Accidental Blogger

A Rogue Book Review (Dean)

Stanley Fish is a national treasure. He has managed seemingly effortlessly to review favorably—quite favorably!—Sarah Palin's book, and with only the slightest hint of irony.

My assessment of the book has nothing to do with the accuracy of its accounts. Some news agencies have fact-checkers poring over every sentence, which would be to the point if the book were a biography, a genre that is judged by the degree to which the factual claims being made can be verified down to the last assertion. “Going Rogue,” however, is an autobiography, and while autobiographers certainly insist that they are telling the truth, the truth the genre promises is the truth about themselves—the kind of persons they are—and even when they are being mendacious or self-serving (and I don’t mean to imply that Palin is either), they are, necessarily, fleshing out that truth. As I remarked in a previous column, autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say will truthfully serve their project, which, again, is not to portray the facts, but to portray themselves.

In one paragraph we are treated to a supremely skilled critical sensibility informed by a life of deep and wide reading. How often has a book reviewer bothered to distinguish biography from autobiography for purposes of adjusting the reader's expectations? This sort of nuanced hair-splitting usually occurs in dreary literary critical elaborations of "texts" and "intentions," "rifts," "abysses," and "interruptions." Fish made his scholarly career participating in and engaging those elaborations, not to mention famously impressing and pissing off his audience at once.

That there are readers of this latest column among the comments who just don't get it is not surprising. (One example: the fellow from Des Moines who fails to recognize that by announcing he doesn't mean to imply Palin is lying, Fish may be promoting that very thesis.) Sure, it's hard to swallow the possibility that the book could be at all artful, but Fish does a fair job of explaining how so. He's a master, a brilliant reader, the craftiest of writers.

How to write a critical review

Via Brian Leiter's blog I found this hilarious assessment of Cornel West, the man and the memoir, by Scott McLemee. Whatever your opinion of West - good, bad or none, the review is recommended reading. Rarely have I come across a lacerating piece such as this one, which on balance comes across as neither harsh nor self serving. Take this gem for example:

As mentioned, his romantic life sounds complicated. Brother West is a reminder of Samuel Johnson’s description of remarriage as the triumph of hope over experience. One paragraph of musings following his third divorce obliged me to put the book down and think about things for a long while. Here it is:

“The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high -- and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!”

No doubt this is meant to be inspirational. It is at any rate exemplary. Rendered more or less speechless, I pointed the passage out to my wife.

She looked it over and said, “Any woman who reads this needs to run in the opposite direction when she sees him coming.”

Returning to the book, I found, just a few pages later, that West was getting divorced for a fourth time. Seldom does reader response yield results that prove so empirically verifiable.

All Sujatha wants for Christmas is a book by Malcom Gladwell

Here is why.

The real reason why Pakistan is fragile

Staying on the topic of Pakistan for one more day - this time I bring you a book review by Indian journalist Manoj Joshi. Written by Pakistani born author Farzana Shaikh, the book examines the underlying causes of Pakistan's political and existential turmoil. According to the author, turning its back on the country's multicultural south Asian past and a deliberate (and sometimes conflicted) attempt to redefine itself as a militant (and military) Arabized Muslim nation may have played a role in precipitating an identity crisis in Pakistan. Created more than sixty years ago by the partition of British India, during the Cold War of the last century, Pakistan was used by the United States as its client state in South Asia as a buffer against both the former Soviet Union's influence in the region as well as India's socialist leaning "non-aligned" international stance. Should Pakistan once more reclaim its softer south Asian roots to counter the artificially imposed Arabic influence? Does making peace (even an uneasy one) with India offer Pakistan an option to settle the upheaval at home? Who knows? In politics things don't always work out the way common sense dictates.

In this context I will share with A.B. readers something very odd that I heard nearly a decade ago. In September, 2000 my husband and I were on a vacation in the beautiful state of Goa on the western Indian coast. One morning I woke up at an unholy early hour due to jet lag. With nothing else to do and the hotel's dining room not yet open for breakfast, I sat listening to an early morning TV interview with an Indian engineer who was also an amateur astrologer. The man made various predictions about world affairs. Two of them have stuck in my memory.  He said that in the upcoming US elections the following November (remember this was the year 2000), Al Gore would be the winner but there might be some "problems" with the results. The other prediction he made was that in 2013, India and Pakistan will form a loose federation with a common currency and that most hostilities between the two countries will cease. I don't believe in either homeopathy or astrology but stranger things have happened. Now on to Manoj's review.

Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (New Delhi/London, Foundation/Hurst, 2009)

Review by Manoj Joshi (Mail Today - November 1, 2009)

The uncertain national identity and contested relationship to Islam lie behind Pakistan’s social and political upheavals, says Farzana Shaikh.

INDIA HAS had difficult relations with Pakistan since inception, but that is understandable given our history. But today there is a widespread sense of exasperation in relation to that country across the world, as well as a sense of alarm. Just what is this country of 160 million people, some of great talent and industry, all about ? Farzana Shaikh’s book title provides perhaps the most comprehensive and well argued answer.

Shaikh, an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs ( Chatham House) in London concludes that the country’s uncertain national identity and contested relationship to Islam lie behind its social and political upheavals and its uncertainty as a nation. As she perceptively notes, the problem is not with Islam itself, but with “ the uncertainty about its influence over Pakistan’s identity as well as with the lack of consensus over the very terms of Islam.” She goes on to add, that it is the arguments and the fights over the “ multiple meanings of Islam” that result in the “ doubts about the meaning of Pakistan and the significance of being Pakistani.” India, of course, looms large in the Pakistani consciousness. As Shaikh has noted, “ much of the uncertainty over Pakistan’s identity stems from the nagging question of whether its identity is fundamentally dependent on India.” Fear of Indian hegemony, political, economic and cultural, has kept Pakistan in a campaign mode against India. To maintain effective parity against its much larger neighbour, Pakistan has sought external alliances, spent an unconscionably great amount of money on defence, made nuclear weapons and finally unleashed a covert war with the help of Islamist jihadis. In fact Shaikh sees Islamabad’s Afghan policy as yet another attempt to shore up its fragile identity by seeking parity with India in the form of assuming the role of a regional hegemon.

In some ways the book takes off where her first book, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India 1860- 1947 , ended. In answering the question "Why Pakistan?” she has argued that two rival discourses of Islam — the communitarian and the Islamist — have struggled “for ascendancy in defining Pakistan’s national identity.” The first was the discourse visible in the secularist politicians like Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim middle- class of central India who played such a key role in the founding of the state. The second is the Islamist discourse “grounded in a religious and at times radical reading of Islam.” The tension between the two yield many ambiguities, but there are also uncertainties associated with the fact that Partition was the consequence of an endgame gone awry, for which the principal political actors of the time — Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and others are responsible.

The problems in defining Pakistan spills over naturally into the other question “Who is a Pakistani?” Shaikh points out, that the definition of ‘the Pakistani’ is still “deeply contested.” It is not just the microscopic Hindu and Sikh minority, the Ahmediya community or even the mohajir whose "Pakistaniness” is questioned, Shia Muslims who comprise anywhere up to 20 per cent of the country’s population are looked on with suspicion. Today, with the radicalisation of the Deobandis, even the Ahle Sunnat or Barelwis are feeling the heat. This of course, does not take into account the alienation of the Pashtuns, the Baloch, Sindhis and the residents of the Northern Areas of occupied Kashmir.

Right Ho and Toodle-oo! (Why India still loves P.G. Wodehouse)

Although he may no longer be eagerly sought out by the reading public in the country of his birth, P.G. Wodehouse enjoys an enviable degree of popularity in India. Every so often I come across reports and articles puzzling over why a long dead British humorist from a long lost era continues to charm a couple of generations of modern Indians who have very little fascination (outside the academic world of literature and history) with the likes of Kipling or the culture of colonial England. Here is an excerpt from the transcript of a report on NPR that I found while searching for Wodehouse: (Do listen to the audio recording of Mandy Cunningham eavesdropping on a group of Wodehouse fans in Bangalore, India)

CUNNINGHAM: These people have gathered to share their love of the works of the comic novelist and satirist P.G. Wodehouse. Each person have adopted the name of their favorite Wodehouse character.

RAHM(ph): My name is Rahm, and I go by the name of Smith, Rupert Smith. Smith preferred to use big, long words. You know, he would use 20 words in a sentence when five would suffice. It's an eccentricity of sorts, but I felt that it's something that I would like to talk myself.

CUNNINGHAM: The group, like many others around India, knows everything there is to know about Wodehouse. They know that he was born in England, that he spent most of his years in the United States, becoming an American citizen, and that he wrote short stories, lyrics for musicals and almost a hundred novels. The reason they're so well informed is that most of them, like Narupa(ph), was introduced to Wodehouse at a very tender age.

NARUPA: When I was about nine or 10, there was this Indi series on TV, and I remember my father was so disgusted with the adaptation that from his office library, he handed out a copy of "Leave it to Smith" and made my sister and me read it.

CUNNINGHAM: Most of the group cut their teeth on stories about Wodehouse's most-famous characters, the erudite gentlemen's gentleman Jeeves and his affable but buffoonish aristocratic boss Bertie Wooster, depicted here in a BBC adaptation.

(Soundbite of BBC program)

Then there was this article I read more than three years ago, attempting to analyze Wodehouse's peculiar hold on middle class India's imagination.  

Up on the eighth floor of a concrete high-rise, I find the retired history lecturer at St Stephen’s College, part of Delhi University, and staff advisor to its Wodehouse Society, smoking a beedi, a pungent roll-up cigarette.

The apartment has a lingering odour of lunchtime curry. It’s a dashed rummy place to be talking about Bertie Wooster. I have come to explore the curious Indian obsession with P. G. Wodehouse.

Nearly 60 years after the nation’s British rulers packed their bags and legged it home, his books are on sale in most bookshops, sometimes nestling nervously between Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf.

Wodehouse never wrote about India, but sells better on the subcontinent than in Britain, with pirated copies in common circulation. He is one of the most heavily requested authors at the British Library in Delhi and there are clubs and internet chatrooms devoted to him. ....

....The club’s [St Stephen’s Wodehouse Society] president in the mid-1980s, Thomas Abraham, is now president of Penguin Books India, the country’s largest Wodehouse publisher. “We’ve all grown up with Wodehouse,” he says. “It’s a phenomenon here. When one of his books goes out of print, everyone goes ballistic. My publishing counterparts in the UK are very amused.”

In a country where most books in English sell fewer than 1,000 copies and 5,000 constitutes a bestseller, the corduroy-suited Abraham estimates that his company sells up to 70,000 Wodehouses a year: part of a thriving “retro-market” that ranges from Agatha Christie to Modesty Blaise. Most Wodehouses are bought by middle-class Indians whose public school-like “English-Medium” education arguably equips them to appreciate the author’s verbal virtuosity and literary allusions better than many Brits.

“Wodehouse’s appeal is a pure sense of linguistic delight,” says Abraham, who has read “about 82” of his 85 books. “In the 1980s there was a debate about whether he was ‘literary’ or not, but the fact is that the books are a great read, laugh-aloud funny.

“It’s a whole world of clean, wholesome, escapist fun and parents here like to hand it down to their children. Today’s humour is fairly dark, but the appeal of these books for parents is: ‘No sex please, we’re Indian’.”

Back in 1945, George Orwell noted the books’ moral uprightness in his celebrated essay In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse: “Most of the people whom Wodehouse intends as sympathetic characters are parasites, and some of them are plain imbeciles, but very few of them could be described as immoral . . . Not only are there no dirty jokes, but there are hardly any compromising situations.”

Orwell recalled meeting a young Indian nationalist who saw Wodehouse as a satirist of English society, “an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true colours . . . On the contrary, a harmless, old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work.”

I don't know that one can accurately point to a national trait, history or culture to explain why Wodehouse is loved by Indians. I happen to be a long time Wodehouse fan but not for some of the reasons described in the Times article. The nostalgia for the Raj, the butler, the pucca sahib culture of the gymkhana etc., none of them works for me.  I think I know what I find so charming about P.G.W. - mainly his extraordinarily adept linguistic calisthenics, for sure. And perhaps also what Orwell said.  Although I am perfectly at home with dark brooding humor, searing satire, biting badinage and cutting edge cleverness, there may indeed be something oddly comforting about a prodigious body of literary work which has no sex, no serious love, little existential angst and very few moral dilemmas. One of my favorite posts here is on Wodehouse, one that I wrote soon after I launched this blog. I am bringing it to the front  for new readers.

On Malcolm Gladwell (Joe)

I couldn't have said it better myself:

IOZ: Heady stuff, no doubt. But Malcolm, won't some people say, oh, that is just glib repackaging of a totally banal and widely appreciated fundamental of everyday, lived experience?

Drive In Libraries (for Dean)

The Houston Public Library system's newest plan for distributing books is a modern twist on the book mobile where books were deliverd on wheels to eager readers. This time, the reader is the driver and  librarians act as car hops. Love the idea. Anything that makes it easier to lay one's hands on books gets my vote.

There'll be no carhops on roller skates. And if you're hankering for a burger and fries, forget it. But if it's food for the mind you crave — books, music or movies — staffers at some of the Houston Public Library's most congested branches will be happy to deliver your order right to your car.

The library's new curbside service, HPL To Go, is being tested at the Looscan Neighborhood Library and the McGovern-Stella Link Library. If trials go well, the service will be extended to other “parking challenged” branches.

HPL To Go joins Info Quest, a program that allows users to text message queries to reference librarians, as the latest additions to the public library's growing roster of services designed to engage 21st century library patrons.

Other recently added services include the HPL Mobile Express — a van loaded with computers that visits under-served neighborhoods — and Info 24/7, which allows users to query reference librarians via the Internet.

Library Executive Director Rhea Brown said she has challenged library workers to find ways to remain relevant in the iPhone era.

“The library is no different from any other business organization,” she said. “For you and I in society, technology is the way of the world.”

Brown said the library, whose 41 locations drew more than 5 million visitors in the last fiscal year, relies on surveys and focus groups to guide improvement efforts. The curb service project grew out of complaints from customers weary of searching for scarce library parking.

“The parking lots are small and their business is very large,” neighborhood library chief Regina Stemmer said of the test sites. Puzzled for a solution, Stemmer said her “eureka moment” came as she spied a card advertising a food delivery service while dining with friends at an area restaurant. What works for chicken fried steaks, she concluded, might work for books.

The rest of the report here.

Private vs Public Lives

Once again an e-mail exchange with my co-bloggers has resulted in a post. I sent the link to this article in the UK Telegraph to all the A.B. authors (link via 3QD). The question was whether we should care about the less than exemplary private lives of public figures, in this particular case, famous authors. Should the knowledge of the nasty details of their personal behavior influence how we view their literary output? Or can we separate their talents from their moral failings?

If William Golding tried, aged 18, to rape a girl of 15, as John Carey claims in his new biography, how should that change our view of his novels?

It's not as if Golding pretended to a rosy view of human nature. The account by the author of Lord of the Flies of his bungled teenage sex attack, we learn, formed part of an explanation for his wife of his own monstrousness. Elsewhere he went as far as to say that if he had been around in Germany at the right time, he'd have become a Nazi.

As it happened, his intended rape victim ran away, and he was busy at Oxford when Hitler was recruiting. But Golding habitually surfeited on the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If he'd been a caveman he'd have joined in the extermination of the gentle Neanderthals, as his novel The Inheritors suggests.

Real rape, though, is different from imagined genocide, for it makes us hate the perpetrator. If the guilty man has set himself up as a moral arbiter it undermines his credibility. That happened to Arthur Koestler. By the 1950s he had become the "universal voice of the twentieth century", wrote one biographer. In the same decade, another biographer discovered, he'd also become a serial rapist. Jill Craigie, the late wife of Michael Foot, confirmed that she was among his victims.

So Koestler was a nasty bit of work, and he ended his life in a double suicide with his wife. But nasty bits of work can make interesting reading and Koestler's despicable violence towards women does not retrospectively make any duller a novel like Darkness at Noon, which focuses on betrayal of a different kind.

I heard back at some length from Dean and Joe.  Here is what they had to say.:

Law and Literature: A Completely Revised View (Dean)

A public defender quits his practice and starts a consulting business for applicants to creative writing programs. A massively accomplished poet and blogger about all things literary and bibliographic picks up on this new direction and sees "a larger vision of poetry in American life." He's at once critical, skeptical, and admiring of the project and its leader. In the process, he gives an abbreviated history of creative writing in the academy from World War II.

At the end of the day, Ron Silliman (the poet) comes to no conclusions. He's only poised to learn more about the consulting project and, as always, about the politics, economics, pedagogy, and poetics of poetry. One of his few committed remarks: "What we do know is this: writing is changing its social function in our society..." If by writing he means literature, I'm inclined to disagree, because literature has no function in society. It doesn't do anything but sit there on the page and occupy shelves in libraries. That's what makes it so compelling. What we do with it and the social function of that behavior is another question.

Read the comments to Ron's post. His subject chimes in, at great length.

Atticus Finch = Big Jim Folsom?

Malcolm Gladwell, the tireless social commentator and examiner of sacred cows and conventional wisdoms has another provocative piece out. This time he analyzes the cultural and moral disposition of Atticus Finch, a leading character in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the celebrated American novel set in the deep south of the 1930s Depression era. In the New Yorker article Gladwell takes a look not just at Finch the man, but also the lawyer. I did not know until I read the Gladwell piece that the fictional Finch's court room tactics on behalf of his beleaguered client has occasionally been a topic of discussion among real life lawyers. I suppose one does analyze and fret over fictional characters when those characters become iconic symbols with respect to societal arrangements and our comfort levels with accepted norms.

The main question posed by Gladwell however, is: When confronted with unpleasant or unethical laws and practices, whether public figures (authors, politicians, lawyers and others) have an obligation to use their platforms to reform such wrongs with vigorous opposition if necessary, or must they work within the system and let their own personal decency be the guideline for bringing about incremental "live-and-let-live" variety of accommodations?

Since Finch's lawyering skills are discussed at length by Gladwell, I asked my lawyer co-bloggers to comment on the essay. I heard back from a couple of them.

Joe, a recent law school graduate asked:

"I can't stop myself from pointing out that Gladwell is annoying and overrated.  But apart from that, I just don't understand why so many people seem to care about the arguable personal failings of a fictional trial lawyer."

Another co-blogger Anna, a disabilities rights attorney who has been in the legal profession for some time had more to say:

"Unlike Joe, I often like Gladwell's pieces, but this one doesn't work for me. My basic problem is that Gladwell avoids obvious textual readings to force a novel thesis. The worst case of this is his reading of Boo Radley at the end. It's explicit in the book that Boo Radley is not just "reclusive"; he has traits we would probably now describe as a developmental disability. And he's no more "respectable" than Tom Robinson.  It's not the "burden of angel-food cake" that worry Atticus and the Sherriff, but concern over how Boo would hold up under the scrutiny that would accompany the cake. The book clearly connects the characters of Tom and Boo as harmless outsiders at the mercy of an often unkind world: the eponymous mockingbirds of the title, whom Atticus says that it is a sin to kill, because

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

The politics based on that view are certainly open to criticism, but not through the trite race/class/gender bias-swap that Gladwell posits. Gladwell's right that To Kill a Mockingbirdis, in many ways, a conservative book, but Lee's blind spot is not so much complacency as it is paternalism. As with Uncle Tom's Cabin, in many ways TKM's obvious ancestor, the book's weakness is that in its appeal to readers' sentiments, it limits its underdogs' characters to noble savages.

Whether the Aristotelian value of human decency and empathy within a society troubled by structural injustice is necessarily bad, or just incomplete, is a separate question that I am too tired to tackle here. Ditto the related question--  given the strengths and weaknesses of our current President-- of compromise versus confrontation. I tend to believe that the world needs both. "Power concedes nothing without a demand" (Frederick Douglass), but zig-zag battles for hearts and minds create fertile territory for the demand, and are important to implementation of a demand that's been satisfied with an order. Brown v. Board of Education carries tremendous declaratory import, but had Folsom or someone else succeeded in equally funding traditionally black schools, regardless of the reasons for doing so, the process of actually carrying out Brown's dictates would have been far easier.

Because it does not fit his thesis, Gladwell also wholly misses the book's point about Due Process-- that justice requires a lawyer to provide the best representation possible even to someone hated and already condemned in the court of public opinion...and that requirement holds true even if the other actors in the process (here, the jury) do not hold up their end of the bargain. I continue to believe in that moral-- the value of due process- though having represented more than my share of underdogs and accused, I also think it's hard not to become embittered by the adversarial system."

More thoughts, anyone? Legalistic or just common sensical?  Also, have any of the law blogs discussed the Gladwell article?

The Misunderstanding

The Misunderstanding

I did not say: You are nothing to me;

I said the hummingbird, the anglerfish

are not amazed at themselves.

I did not say: I have forgotten you;

but that every day a man

finds more things that trouble him.

Not You are not beautiful,

but that, often, when I lie in the grass,

a lute sings in the earth beneath me.

Not: I regret—

but that I stare at these keys

I carry in my pocket

and think of the narrow bones

I once turned over in the garden.

Not I never loved you,

but You are all you have.

as for the rest, yes,

it is as you say, the words

are mine, but all the rooms of the world

we have lived in close now

over the words of others.

Earth, keys, man—

when will you seek out

that lamp, that light,

under which they were written?


by Ralph Culver
from: Albatross; Anabiosis Press, Spring 2009

 

(via Jim Culleny at 3 Quarks Daily)

Writing about Work (Dean)

Last week, Ruchira featured an article by Matthew Crawford about the redemptive value of manual labor. My comment begins, "Crawford is full of it." Read the comment if you care to know why I think so. Now, thanks to Ron Silliman's blog, I see another "philosophically" styled column by Alain de Botton in the Boston Globe about a purported dearth of novels in recent years dealing with work life. (The scare quotes respect Wikipedia's report that de Botton is a writer with a philosophical style, i.e., not a working philosopher. Certainly the column consists mostly of leisurely musing, nothing remotely philosophical in an academic sense.)

De Botton evidently would like to see more literature about all kinds of work contexts, including the corporate offices shunned by Crawford in favor of a motorcycle repair shop. But his advocacy for such literature stems from a sense that the work can indeed be mind-numbing and alienating. It would be literature's job to depict in modern work life "new varieties of sensory deprivation, melancholy, boredom, passion, eroticism, vindictiveness, charity, triviality, and seriousness." Novels about website optimization and telephone company management would assist readers to see the richness of these enterprises.

I wonder whether there is in fact a void of recent literature about work. De Botton points to recent Booker Prize winners, a sample that is surely skewed. But how would one search for novels about work, anyway? You could search your local library for books with a subject like Work -- Fiction, but there are drawbacks to such an approach. For one, that particular Library of Congress heading is intended for children's books. More significantly, there are obviously many work related topics that would not be described as fiction about "work," "labor," "employment," i.e., the general theme of de Botton's piece. There are also books about blue collar workers, working women, and so forth, as well as about particular jobs and professions. Searching Berkeley Public Library's collection for works with the keywords "corporate" and "fiction" produces 41 results, many recent, and many of which would seem meaningful to de Botton. Admittedly, he probably wouldn't enjoy Personal Days by Ed Parks, which is perhaps not in the tradition of Balzac and Dickens.

Nevertheless, I don't think de Botton has really done his homework. By focusing on a narrow, elite arena of literature he precludes, in a sense by definition, works that would satisfy his desideratum. But this move serves him well, because it permits him to claim as his own (rather than any mere Booker Prize recipient's) the observation that seemingly dull work can be interesting. In this respect he shares with Crawford a view, either naive or condescending, that the appreciation of work requires a special kind of philosophical or literary insight.

But Seidel, and My Seidel? (Dean)

Rarely is a poet given the level of coverage devoted two weeks ago to Frederick Seidel in the New York Times. It takes more than merely exquisite poesy to ascend to that particular Parnassus. Seidel has more. As the article explains, he is an independently wealthy, finely suited older white man whose works address wealth and age, exercise his obsessions for motorcycles and airplanes, and explore his taste for sex. What? That's news?

It's nice to see Seidel so prominently featured, and I aim to buy the new volume of collected works, even though I have nearly all of his individual books. But the article gets so much wrong. Yes, Seidel's topics are often unsettling, the images surreal. Consider "Chartres," from My Tokyo:

The takeoff of the Concorde in a cathedral.
Ninety seconds into it they cut
The afterburners and the deathly silence
Was like a large breast as we banked steeply left.

This is indeed a disturbing little verse. Yet Wyatt Mason, who wrote the Time's profile of Seidel--rather, who wrote the profile of Wyatt Mason rubbing elbows with Seidel--seems to have missed the point about "poetry's power to disturb" with his opening account of the threatening phone message left for Seidel. Clearly, the woman who left the eerie message was disturbed, but not by poetry. The article's point seems to be to promote the new volume by scandalizing the poet, a fair enough marketing ploy. Ron Silliman gets it right when he refers to it as a "fetish piece."

Any publicity is good publicity, a cliché Seidel might admire as a topos, but he'll leave the dirty work to his publisher and the NYT. So, sprinkled among Mason's inventory of poetic improprieties are blurby superlatives: “the best American poet writing today,” "the most frightening American poet ever." (For the latter, I would have guessed Edgar Guest.) And then there's Billy Collins' petty misreading, "When he mentions East Hampton or the Carlyle or Le Cirque or Ducati, it doesn’t even seem like name-dropping." No, former poet laureate Collins, it does seem like name-dropping--call it allusion, if you prefer academic jargon--because it is name-dropping. It's a Seidel trademark, lyric punctuated with trademarks!

Most revealing to me in Mason's work is the early connection of Seidel with Ezra Pound's Cantos. I wasn't aware that Seidel had been so inspired, but with hindsight, of course! As poets go, they both often render lines palpable--compare the gutturals in the first line from "Chartres" with the sibilants in a line like "So-shu churned in the sea" from Pound--to provoke in the reader a physical engagement with the text, in the service of aesthetic qualities such as mimesis, percussive rhythm, or sonic ties from line to line that fall short of rhyme. Notice how the L in "cathedral" appears four times in the last line, where it further brackets a chiasmus of Ls and Bs: "like a large breast" X "banked steeply left"? At this level, it hardly matters that he writes lines that seem uncomplicatedly cruel, whatever that means.

Hugo Chavez, the Bibliophile

Want your book to shoot up on the bestsellers list? A sure fire way is to have a celebrity or an enemy endorse it.  The much maligned Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is one such enemy who has helped with the brisk sales of at least two books by promoting them at world venues. The first time, Chavez helped propel Noam Chomsky's “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” to Amazon's Top Ten list in 2006 by brandishing it during a speech at the UN.  Now he has done the same favor to an obscure book of Latin American history by making a public gift of it to President Obama at last week's Summit of the Americas. The last time I checked, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's  "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" was # 2 on Amazon.

 

(Could we get Hugo to mention our blog in public?)

Sukrita

My sister-in-law Sukrita Paul Kumar's profile, poems and paintings in the Houston Literary Review.

Bland Book Reviews :-)

  (Woman Reading : Kuniyoshi Utagawa)

A recent post, a joint effort between reader Narayan Acharya and me, led fellow blogger Namit Arora to write the following comment on our blog.

Ruchira, I noticed once again your approach to book reviews where you present a mostly descriptive overview about the story/plot/setting, even how others might react to it, but stay away from saying what *you* thought was really great about it, what moved you, what really sucked, etc. The review is still a good read - don't get me wrong - but it is a curious choice and I remain puzzled why an otherwise opinionated woman should consciously prefer such a bland middle ground when reviewing novels. (Contrast that with Narayan's approach. It's clear the book shook up the man to the core, prompting him to even demand that Ghosh get a life! :-)

Namit draws attention to Narayan's impassioned critique of the author's style and my own descriptive plot driven approach to the review of the same novel, Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. In response to Namit's query I will attempt to explain to our readers why my book reviews come across more as précis style presentations than literary criticisms.

Although an avid reader from early childhood, I have never been a terribly literary person. I treat books very much like meals - to be examined, consumed, deriving whatever nutrition they offer and moving on.  Some are relished like gourmet treats, some approached with playful or cautious interest and others summarily rejected after the first bite. No matter how deep an imprint a book leaves on my memory and my psyche, I feel little need to dwell too long on it or to connect it to a past or future reading experience in any formally meaningful way. Although I do recall with precision how a very good book managed to touch me, I don't feel compelled to recount the details of those feelings to others who may or may not agree with my assessment.  Reading seems like a very private enjoyment. Therefore the lack of ardor in public.

Why don't I then write "negative" book reviews? Simple - I don't read too many bad books. More often than not, after the quality of the style, narrative and subject matter has been established in the first fifty or so pages, I rarely ever continue to read a book that I do not like. My mother, a student of literature, who had the infinite patience (and training) to plod through tedious and rotten writings (cursing all the way), used to wonder about my ability to throw aside a book that I had "already begun."  Fortunately, as a science student, literature for me has always been a pursuit of pleasure, not a requirement. I therefore never feel the need to labor through a book or author that puts me off. (In the past decade though, since joining my beloved neighborhood book club, where the choice of reading material is a democratic process, I have had to endure several literary embarrassments.)

When I began blogging, I knew for sure that I would be writing about books and authors. I made a conscious decision to write only about books that I myself like and would want my readers to enjoy. No negative criticism was to sully the pages of the blog (for that I had politics and politicians) and take up precious time and space. Not that I don't enjoy reading negative reviews and wouldn't be adept at writing one. I do believe that it is easier to shred something we don't like to ribbons than to admire the admirable. Some of the liveliest sessions of our monthly book club meetings occur when we have read a particularly impossible piece of crap and the ladies come armed with choice words of denigration. But I decided to refrain from that practice in public.  Possessing a sharp tongue, I feared that I may flaunt my sarcasm and capacity for snark too well. Also, if I don't want our visitors to read a particular book, why bring it up? In other words, what I write here on A.B. are really book recommendations rather than reviews in the strict sense of the word. Hence the descriptive overview of the story/plot/setting which if intriguing enough, a reader will check out for him/herself.

Take the review of the Sea of Poppies for example. I tell enough (with necessary warnings) that if the readers wants to find out more, they will seek the book out or as Namit did, will give it a pass. And why is my own part of the review laconic compared to Narayan's passionate love-hate outpourings? Well, for one, although I very much liked Amitav Ghosh's dense period piece, I didn't absolutely love the book. I learnt a number of things I didn't know before but being quite familiar with the politics and culture of 19th century India, there were not many surprises either. I didn't feel that either the literary effort  or the history lesson deserved too many superlatives.  As for the most intriguing aspect of the novel, the unusual application of language, with my strong grasp of Hindi and Bengali (including their more archaic dialects), I found Ghosh's carefully laid out linguistic obstacle course quite easy to navigate. I did warn that others less familiar with the vernacular might find themselves climbing a wall. That's where Narayan came in with his excellent rant - taking up where the description ends and the head banging starts, turning the post into a genuine critical review.  

Sea of Poppies

(The following review contains the opinions of Ruchira Paul and Narayan Acharya.)

 Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, the first part of a projected trilogy may be his most straight forward narrative to date. A historian/ anthropologist by training, Ghosh has a proclivity of whipping around between distant times and places while weaving his tales.  The present in his books is almost always connected to a contextual past. The intricate and shifting backdrops often make his books unappealing to some readers who find them difficult to read.  Sea of Poppies, on the other hand, unfolds in a single time frame - early 19^th century.

Since the 1980s when I first discovered Ghosh's Circle of Reason, I have read nearly all his books and enjoyed them. Sea of Poppies was no exception. A detailed and exotic novel, it is set in the burgeoning days of the British Raj in India. The author takes us on a downriver journey into the "black waters" of the open sea on a refurbished slave ship of an era when slavery was common practice in the US and European nations were vying with each other to find their colonial foothold in Asia and Africa.  

A historical novel, Sea of Poppies is also a love story(ies) flowering both on land and water. It is the account of thriving global trade, addictions, greed, betrayal, war, occupation and the rigid hierarchy of class, caste, race and power. Thoroughly researched, Ghosh meticulously creates the culture of 19^th century India in the early grips of foreign occupation and that of seafaring adventurers, pirates and mercenaries. It is set in a time when the East India Company had discovered that among the varied natural resources across the vast expanse of India, the land and climate of the north central Gangetic plains offered one more lucrative opportunity of raising revenues for the British crown which had the additional enticing value of becoming the gateway to China. Under British supervision, the first large scale opium production in India's history began in a region across eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar where farmers were commissioned (coerced) to devote their entire tracts of agricultural land to the growing of poppies for opium. Some quantities of the opium produced in India entered the local markets and it was also utilized for medical purposes in the form of morphine, an effective pain killer and anesthetic. But a large portion of the raw opium was exported to China, the other large Asiatic nation whose wealth and resources the Brits eyed hungrily and whose rulers, fearful of the European intent in Asia, had adamantly barred entry to foreigners. The plan was to make the Chinese so addicted and dependent on opium that out of desperation, the wily mandarins would open the doors of the secretive land to the procurers of the drug. Apart from the complicated shenanigans of opium trafficking, the novel also introduces readers to another British export -  the first large scale relocation of Indian laborers to Africa, the Caribbeans and the far east as indentured servants, slaves with a new name. 

At the heart of the epic saga lie the goings and comings of Ibis, a converted American slave ship purchased by a British businessman in Calcutta to transport human cargo for labor needed in the plantations of Mauritius. The novel's characters include a motley mix - the scruffy multinational crew of the Ibis and its nervous passengers who set sail together, some fleeing their destinies in their native land and others on a mission to find new ones on foreign shores. Ghosh has promised us a trilogy. Sea of Poppies, the first installment, ends on an uncertain note. We are not quite sure where the Ibis is headed - to the intended East African coast or off course, somewhere else. We will have to wait until the next two books to find out.

A survival tale of desperation and adventure, Sea of Poppies is also very much about language. In fact, the author seems to have deliberately set about to create a primer for his readers in Maithili / Bhojpuri (lilting dialects of north central India) and the arcane domestic English of the Indian subcontinent which was to become the common parlance of the British ruling class. The linguistic calisthenics of the dialogues, rather than the dense story line, may prove to be the main stumbling block for many readers. While the foreign tongue of the native characters is dutifully clarified in standard English, Ghosh liberally puts words from Lascar lingo and Hobson-Jobson  without the benefit of translation in the mouths of characters who actually converse in English. Those fluent in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, will be able to decipher the antiquated mongrel English of those speakers. Others may lose patience after a few tries.

My copy of Sea of Poppies, signed by the author, is published by Viking, a branch of Penguin India. My brother-in-law presented it to me on my last birthday. It comes without a glossary. The US edition evidently does contain one for the convenience of American readers. Rather, it contains a  Chrestomathy.  More about that from Narayan Acharya:

Text, Book, Matter (Dean)

The latest Chronicle of Higher Education (January 9, 2009) includes a brief article (sub'n req'd) about an English professor and his biologist brother, who together are developing a way to use DNA to determine the local origins of medieval manuscripts.

While in Europe researching the origins of a poem, Timothy L. Stinson, an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University, became frustrated with the limited methods available for determining where the original text came from and when it was produced.

"And then there was sort of this light bulb," Mr. Stinson recalled. "Wait a minute, they're on animal skin. Why can't we look at DNA?"

Indeed, in the age before paper was widely available and affordable, the written word was recorded on the hides of sheep, goats, and cattle. Shortly after Mr. Stinson had his epiphany, he began putting his idea into practice. Working with his brother, a biologist who has performed DNA extraction and analysis, Mr. Stinson is developing a method of using DNA to determine when and where medieval manuscripts were written. The approach will significantly improve the accuracy of the standard identification process, which typically relies on analysis of the author's handwriting and dialect — approaches that are "notoriously unreliable," Mr. Stinson says.

Here is where the disciplines of art and science (and history and sociology...) perfectly complement one another. There is some precedent for this partnership. In the mid-'80s, Paul Needham, currently rare books librarian at Princeton, but then at the Pierpont Morgan Library, worked with physicists at (if memory serves me well) UC Davis to conduct cyclotron analysis of the ink used by Gutenberg in the production of his Bible. Their work (see the articles cited at the end of the the foregoing link) produced fascinating conjectures about the details of work in Gutenberg's atelier, tied to findings about the physical substance comprising his books.

But before Needham, there was Allan Stevenson. I read Stevenson's monumental Problem of the Missale Speciale (London: Bibliographical Society, 1967) in one sitting at UCLA's library school shortly after the Needham cyclotron articles appeared. Obviously, Stevenson worked with cruder technology than Needham and Stinson: a microscope, photography, his unaided vision, the historical tools of papermaking. Watermarks are formed by wires shaped and anchored to the wire mesh of a papermold, the bed on which paper was made. Naturally, the shaped wires began to lose their shape as more paper was produced on the mold. Observing the gradual deformation of watermarks in the paper used to print the eponymous missal, Stevenson, like Needham, was able to suggest how the work proceeded from copy to copy.

"And then there was sort of this light bulb..." Perhaps it's not at all ironic for Stinson to resort to a not quite antiquated figure to reflect the moment of his discovery.

My Bleeding City

Author Suketu Mehta in the New York Times on the Mumbai terrorist mayhem.

MY bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There’s something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.

The rest of the article here.  (Mehta is a bit over the top with his sentimentality, just as many New Yorkers were after 9/11. But what he says about the religious tolerance of big, diverse Indian megapolises used to be true only a decade or so ago - that's the India in which I grew up.)

Bad Sex Award (Dean)

So we've taken lately to writing about writing, and Ruchira chastises some of us for carrying on below the fold when we ought to be generating more copy for AB. I won't bury this in the comments, then, or anywhere else, for that matter. As I write, the decision has already been rendered, but it's worth starting with the early story and then proceeding to the result. (Link courtesy of Ron Silliman's marvelous blog.)

Payback: A Review (Sujatha)

Prize-winning novelist Margaret Atwood's latest is a book based on a series of lectures delivered early this year: "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth". (You can listen to them streaming online or download the podcasts from this link until Dec 19, after which they will be available for a fee at iTunes).

Atwood brings her trademark wry humor and considerable word-mongering skills to tracing and sweeping over the concept of debt and payback in all fields. Tracking back through the historical depiction of 'something owed and something redeemed' from ancient Egyptian and Greek myth till the concept of sin and redemption overtook the majority of the populace as they moved on from the old gods to the new, she casts a sulphurous spotlight on the various episodes.

No analysis of debt in the literary world can ignore the fact that it has served as one of the best plot devices of all time. 'Payback' is no exception, taking detailed looks at novels like The Mill on the Floss and the granddaddy of debt dramas The Merchant of Venice. It even includes a hilarious and yet faintly disturbing retelling of The Christmas Carol that mixes the original Dickens with Oryx and Crakian dystopia.

Altogether, a refreshing read (or listen for those so inclined) as we ponder the ramifications of the enormous debt that the country has piled up over the last eight years. We may be going down under (and dreading the next bill from the credit card company or mortgage company), but it might as well be in style, enjoying a good cuppa while we savor the rollicking richness of Ms.Atwood's ruminations.

Genius and Success: Inspiration or Perspiration?

According to Malcom Gladwell, it is mostly the latter. In fact he believes that to be really good at "anything," ten years of practice are a minimum. Also, the inspiration and the perspiration must come not just from the prospective genius' own brain and pores but from his/ her family, friends, school and community. In other words, it does take a village to jump start a genius. For example, Gladwell takes great umbrage at the Bush brothers, George W. and Jeb, born to wealth and privilege (sons and grandsons a senator and a president) blithely identifying as "self made" men.

While they are the essential ingredients for success, according to Gladwell, talent, hard work and dedication are not quite enough. Going by the reviews and Gladwell's own interviews about his new book, Outliers (which I have not read), the author argues that who among the talented set becomes a successful genius, depends also to a large extent on luck. No matter how good one is at one's true calling or how hard and long the labor of love, nothing succeeds like "luck" and that Gladwell points out, is often determined by the time of one's birth. No, not in the astrological sense, but whether civilization is ready for a certain type of genius at a particular point in history. Like everything else that Gladwell has written, this premise too sounds interesting and compelling for the most part mainly because the author fits the figures with his theory. There is little to argue about as long as one picks examples that follow Gladwell's pattern and packaging of the lucky genius. Jerry Adler, the Newsweek reviewer wonders however about geniuses like Einstein and Shakespeare whose name and fame cannot easily be explained by their being perfect fits with the prevailing zeitgeist of their times. Actually, human thinking would be a stagnant, slow moving pool if all conspicuous works of genius were mere reinforcements (or minor tweakings) of prior knowledge and existing cultural mores. Otherwise we would never have heard of Darwin, Copernicus (Galileo), Lincoln, Marx, Jesus or Buddha. They too were outliers, perhaps the more notable ones.

Life is unfair, as even the bible acknowledges ("Unto every one that hath shall be given … "). We can't all hit a baseball like DiMaggio or sing like the Beatles. But how much do we understand about those who can? Not enough, says Malcolm Gladwell, in his new book, "Outliers: The Story of Success." We attribute the Beatles' fabulous success to being, well, the Beatles, four cute boys who happened to possess amazing musical talents. Gladwell has a different explanation. The Beatles, he says, lucked into a gig at a strip club in Germany where they had to play as long as eight hours a night, in styles ranging from bubblegum pop to hard-driving blues—making them possibly the best-rehearsed band in the world when they answered the call of the Ed Sullivan show. We can't all be like the Beatles, but neither could John, Paul, George and Ringo, if their experiences had been different. As a determinant of success, talent is overrated, compared to, among other things, luck.....

"Outliers" opens with a typically Gladwellian puzzle: why are so many professional hockey players born early in the year? It turns out that Canadian youth leagues group players by age, based on a calendar year, so a player born in January will be the oldest on his team, enjoying a big difference in size and maturity. The early birds get more playing time and coaching, advantages that become self-reinforcing, spelling the difference between an NHL career and a job as a high-school coach. Life is unfair.

The Philosopher and the Wolf

An unusual story of a man his animal companion.  (via Leiter Reports)

It's strange. I can remember all these things about Brenin and Yukon and Sitka. I can remember holding Brenin up to my face and looking in his yellow wolf eyes. I can remember the way he felt, with his soft cub fur, between my hands as I held him. I can still picture clearly Yukon standing up on his hind legs, staring down at me, big feet hanging over the stable door. I can still picture Brenin's brothers and sisters running around the pen, tumbling over each other and jumping back to their feet in glee. But of the person who sold me Brenin, I can remember virtually nothing. Something had already started; a process that would become more and more pronounced as the years rolled on. I was already starting to tune out human beings. When you have a wolf, they take over your life in a way that a dog seldom does. And human company gradually becomes less and less significant for you. I remember his story - at least I think I do - but I don't remember the man.

The Softer Side of Orwell

No one speaks the language of politics as thoughtfully, accurately and dispassionately as Orwell did. The contrast with the heedless conversation witnessed in our recent political campaign about patriotism, honor, "real" America, socialists, terrorists, pigs, pitbulls and barracudas is painfully stark.

Here is an interesting blog - Orwell's journal entries published daily on the same date as Orwell wrote them seventy years ago. (the dates appear in the non-American style - day / month /year) Most are pastorial musings about the weather, gardening and farm animals alongside some simple sketches. No political language here but fun to read nonetheless.

Post-Restoration Poetry and Campaign 2008 (Dean)

Stanley Fish is famous for taking seemingly gratuitously extreme, provocative positions for the sake of aggravating his readers, many of whom wrongly associate him with a bland, outmoded flavor of so-called postmodern "thought." (That's a topic for another day's post.) His occasional columns in the New York Times typically generate polar responses in the comments when, for example, he writes in favor of an absolute prohibition against teachers revealing their political preferences in class. His latest column has largely avoided the intense disagreement, despite the fact that he casts the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates as, respectively, Jesus and Satan.

Jesus and Satan, that is, as depicted in the poetry of John Milton. Obama's campaign style has been passive and calm, while "[t]he McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge..."

What’s going on here? I find an answer in a most unlikely place, John Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” a four-book poem in which a very busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the arch-rebel (i.e., maverick) loses it, crying in exasperation, “What dost thou in this world?”

This post has apparently garnered more than the usual proportion of favorable responses. Leave it to Fish to render Milton pertinent to a 2008 US presidential election, and to do it without forcing an analogy. He locates the wisdom of the poetry and brings it to bear on the current scene. I appreciate his attention to words: each party affords "discipline and care" different shades of meaning. (Nobody, on the other hand, disputes the significance of "a boatload of money.") The Jesus/Satan business is all Milton's doing, of course, characters in a literary work, types in a cosmology, perhaps. Fish just happens to know more about the underlying work—not to mention its enduring vitality—than anybody else on the planet.