Accidental Blogger

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 - the 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 is 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 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.

"A long-buried scandal may taint a giant’s reputation" (Dean)

I wish I were more familiar with the works of Milan Kundera, one of whose books I read approximately fourteen thousand years ago when Philip Roth compiled a series for Penguin of then unfamiliar Eastern European writers. This story reminds me of the lingering disgrace of literary theorist Paul de Man, whose "palling around" with Nazi collaborationists in Belgium as a young adult journalist came to haunt him post-mortem and, for all practical purposes, thoroughly crush his scholarly reputation. The "taint" smeared many of his professional associates, as well, in a bizarre, juvenile episode of academic name-calling and imputation of guilt by association. (And that's why, Ruchira, I have left the "palling around" bit in the post, contrary to your request.)

My sense is that the literature is and ought to be protected. If Kundera's novels were excellent, they remain so. I'm entirely open to the possibility that his writing is merely "intellectual pornography for mediocre Western readers," but that's a judgment independent of his political misdeeds. The books are distinct from his reputation. I believe the same of de Man, whose work I continue to read and re-read. The irony, the hypocrisy in fact heighten the effect of the work.

'Hari Puttar' Redux (Dean)

The long awaited resolution to the hotly contested Hari/Harry Puttar/Potter suit has emerged, in Hari's favor. Well, not really long awaited, and probably not all that hotly contested. In fact, this case, like the recent suit resulting in an injunction prohibiting the publication of a Harry Potter lexicon, pretty much points out the imbecility of some areas of so-called intellectual so-called property law. Rowling's publisher won that suit, so I'm happy to see Warner Bros.'s claims rejected here. The notion that Hari might "confuse" consumers into thinking he's Harry is absurd. The lexicon case may be a closer call, but I find myself among a slim minority who believe the probably badly-executed lexicon shouldn't have been held to infringe on Rowling's (or the publisher's) copyright, despite what the judge found to be copious copying from Rowling's works. It was nothing more nor less than a reference work focused on the text of the series. There is no other sensible way to produce a useful lexicon. One must copy and paraphrase another's so-called original text.

Bubble Buster

See our own Andrew's review of economist Robert J. Shiller's new book The Subprime Solution, in The New York Observer.

Hari Puttar - A Comedy of Terrors

Indeed! The empire of the Harry Potter franchise has long arms. Trade mark H.P. is guarded like the Fort Knox (is Fort Knox still being guarded?). Any infringement, real or perceived, on the pricey trademark is cause for legal action. A Mumbai based film company is now feeling the wrath of the magical money making machine of J. K. Rowling / Warner Bros. for supposedly playing fast and loose with the Harry Potter name. Can Warner really prove theft of intellectual property in this case? Hari is indeed a common Indian name and puttar does mean "son" in Punjabi.  If the story line of the film does not mimic any of Rowling's own literary creations, what is the problem? A lot of hogwash from Hogwarts in my opinion.   (story via WSJ Law Blog; link: Dean)

NEW DELHI, India (Hollywood Reporter) – Warner Bros. has filed a lawsuit against Mumbai-based producer/distributor Mirchi Movies related to the title of its upcoming film "Hari Puttar -- A Comedy of Terrors," which Warners feels is a tad too similar to its franchise about a certain young wizard.

The case is being heard in the Bombay High Court and comes up for hearing Monday (August 25). "Hari Puttar," a comedy that centers on a 10-year-old Indian boy whose family moves to England, is slated for a September 12 release.

"We have recently commenced proceedings against parties involved in the production and distribution of a movie entitled 'Hari Puttar,"' London-based Warners spokeswoman Deborah Lincoln said. "Warner Bros. values and protects intellectual property rights. However, it is our policy not to discuss publicly the details of any ongoing litigation."

The Hari Puttar name began making the rounds here as a comic gag when the first "Harry Potter" film was released. Hari is a popular Indian name, and "puttar" means "son" in the Punjabi language.

"Since the case is sub-judice, we can't comment as of now," Mirchi Movies CEO Munish Purii said. "However, we registered the 'Hari Puttar' title in 2005, and it's unfortunate that Warner has chosen to file a case so close to our film's release. In my opinion, I don't think our title has any similarity or links with 'Harry Potter."'

The Girl From Foreign

The reviews on Amazon and in the Washington Post of The Girl from Foreign, Sadia Shepard's journey into the past to resurrect her Jewish Indian grandmother's lost identity, has left me curious enough to put the book in my Amazon shopping cart. I plan to check it out in the near future. The story is common enough - a member of an obscure and tiny religious minority community getting absorbed into a larger religious group on account of marriage and in the midst of great political upheaval losing touch with the home on whose shores she believed her shipwrecked ancestors had landed two thousand years ago. Shepard's book recounts a family story which is a patchwork of all three Abrahamic faiths and hopscotches across three nations in search of roots.

From the Washington Post:

Besides being a personal memoir and a portrait of a family that includes the world's three major monotheistic religions, "The Girl From Foreign" is a meditation on how our individual memories inevitably slip away, either into oblivion or into that dull collective consciousness we call history.

The main, organizing event here occurred in 1947, when India at once gained its independence from Britain and split into two countries -- Hindus remaining primarily in the main body of the subcontinent; Muslims peeling off to the west and east, to form Pakistan. (Decades later, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.) The average American, if there is such a thing, might remember 1947 as part of the beginning of the Cold War. But Indians have the nerve to be fascinated by the events that occurred in their own country that year, the public history that overlaps, vividly, with their personal memories.

Little Sadia Shepard and her younger brother, Cassim, grew up first in Denver, then Chestnut Hill, Mass., in what she considered to be a wonderful and normal life with three terrific adults: her American dad, a tall, rangy, white Protestant; her beautiful Muslim mother, who was born and raised in an affluent home in Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan; and her sweet maternal grandmother, who raised the kids and kept the house while the adult couple ran an architectural firm. This grandma has a set of slightly dissonant memories: "A very long time ago," she tells young Sadia, "your ancestors left Israel in a ship . . . and they were shipwrecked, in India. They were Jews, but they settled in India. In the shipwreck they lost their Torahs, and they forgot their religion." Sadia's nana had spent her early adult years as a Muslim wife in a beautiful beach house in Bombay. But she was neither Hindu nor Muslim. Her prayers, years later, are Muslim, but in her childhood she was a Jew.

For those who are curious about the history of Judaism in India, please see my review of Who Are the Jews of India? by Nathan Katz.

The Man Who Would Be King

"To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force,.... is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe."  : Josiah Harlan, 1799-1871 - First American in Afghanistan

Recently, in quick succession, I read two books about Afghanistan. One, "The Kite Runner", a best selling novel by the Afghan born Khaled Hossseini, is perhaps known to many readers. The other, "The Man Who Would Be King", by British writer and journalist (The Times, London) Ben Mcintyre is a historical non- fiction which reads like a work of fiction. Mcintyre' book is the biography of the first American believed to have entered Afghanistan, where he fought wars, retraced Alexander's footsteps in Central and South Asia and even became a "king", under circumstances both amazing and amusing.  It is widely believed that Rudyard Kipling's famous eponymous short story (made into a film by John Huston, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine) was based on the life of this early American adventurer.

The Man Who Would Be King is the improbable life story of American Josiah Harlan, a young Quaker from Chester County, Pennsylvania. In 1822, Harlan, an earnest young man of twenty two, robust in health and florid in his imagination, set out to seek a new life with nothing more at his disposal than a love of adventure, history (especially the exploits of Alexander the Great of Macedonia) and botany.  His journey began in Philadelphia and landed him in Calcutta, India, by way of China in 1824. In India he enlisted as an assistant surgeon in the army of the East India Company (the precursor to the British Raj) although the only medical knowledge Harlan possessed came from a medical manual he read during his ocean crossing. After being injured during battle in Burma, Harlan obtained his discharge from the Company's army and traveled to northwest India and Afghanistan, seeking to realize his fondest dream - to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.

For several  years, Harlan crossed and re-crossed the border between India (now Pakistan) and Afghanistan. In a political climate, where every man was spinning in a private orbit of political ambition, alliances were made and broken with dizzying pace.  Harlan played the field on several different sides with the keen eye of a mercenary. He accumulated considerable wealth, acted as a doctor and a governor to a powerful Indian king, sided with and opposed the British and conspired for and against several Afghan aspirants to the throne.

Between the years,1837 -1839, Harlan returned to Afghanistan for the final and most eventful of his journeys. By this time he was thoroughly enamored of this rugged and dangerous land, spoke the local languages fluently, dressed in Afghan garb and sincerely admired the Afghan ruler, Dost Mohammed, who made him his military advisor. On behalf of  the king, Harlan undertook a grueling expedition across the treacherous Hindu Kush Mountains. His mission, to subdue a particularly pesky and unscrupulous Uzbek warlord, based  in the vicinity of Balkh, a central Asian town closely associated with Alexander of Macedonia. The dual purpose of serving his friend, the king, and traveling in Alexander's footsteps made it a doubly attractive venture and Harlan performed his duties with aplomb and joy.  His impossible mission was successful and somewhere between leaving Kabul, defeating the enemy and his return to the capital, the Quaker from Pennsylvania became the Prince of Ghor, the ruler of the Hazaras ! It was to be the most momentous event in Harlan's already interesting life.   

Josiah Harlan returned home to Pennsylvania after 22 years of high adventure and in his own mind, as an Afghan "king". His first order of business upon returning home was to write and publish a bitter diatribe against the British imperial design in the Indian subcontinent. He continued to write prolifically but could never again publish another book, including his memoirs. His first book caused so much uproar and anger in Britain that the American publishers did not want to take another chance with Harlan's writings. Disappointed, Harlan spent the rest of his life as a mill operator, a "civilian general" in the Union army during the Civil War, got married and had a daughter.  But he had left his heart in Afghanistan and longed to return there and claim his "kingdom". To that end, he tried to convince the US government to finance his trips to Afghanistan as a "camel procurer and a grape agent"!  But Harlan never did return to his kingdom which was as much a geographical place in a far away land, as it was a fantasy in his own mind. He died a poor and lonely man in San Francisco in 1871. Among his meager belongings which were returned to his widow, were a "fine golden sword, an ancient miniature ruby engraved with the image of Athena and a sheaf of yellowing papers in Persian script, which were the royal warrants of an Afghan prince".

Josiah Harlan's life story reads like a fairy tale adventure with echoes in the present.  An American, leading military expeditions through Jalalabad, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif, Bamian and Kabul - places most American first heard of after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002.  The Afghanistan of the 1830s was not too different from Afghanistan today - invasions by Western powers, widespread unrest, sporadic and precarious peace and warlords running amok. Harlan, the mercenary prince and early imperialist, faced the dilemma of all occupiers - either the colonizer must shed his own humanity in order to oppress fellow humans or he must acknowledge the humanity of his enemy. For Harlan, the second path prevailed and the "pompous prince" began to see the colonization through the eyes of the colonized. His observation is as true today as it was more than one hundred fifty years ago - "To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force,.... is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe." In the end, Harlan reverted to what he was brought up to be in the progressive and tolerant Quaker community of his youth - a Jeffersonian American who militated at the outrage of "offense against liberty".

Note: Although I enjoyed this book very much, I hesitate to make a general recommendation of it. One woman's cup of tea in this case may be another person's valium.  But those who are curious about exotic and obscure stories of the past with lessons for the present, will enjoy it. If you don't want to own a copy, check it out at the library. 

Update: This review first appeared in November of 2005, less than a month after I had launched the blog. A couple of days ago I went back to the archives for it because a friend inquired about The Man Who Would Be King. At the time of its first posting, A.B. readership was much smaller than it is now. Many of our current readers may not have seen the article. Unlike political and cultural news,  most book reviews are not time sensitive. I decided therefore to bring the post to the front for those readers who found A.B. at a later date. The book is one of my favorites and I really enjoyed reviewing it.

A Debate About Reading, Or Just Another FA in the NYT? (Dean)

My reading skills are declining. For instance, I’m not sure what this recent, “most popular” NYT article is about. At first it appears to pit reading books against reading online digital text, as if one were compelled to choose exclusively between the two, or as if the two behaviors were distinct approaches to a single clear result, such as “get[ting] into college.” But then it transitions (a real verb, courtesy of U.S. aeronautics jargon, c. 1975, so I’ve learned from the online version of the OED) to a more nuanced discussion of the heuristic or therapeutic value of reading on the Web, particularly for folks who have trouble reading traditional hard copy texts or who suffer other educational disadvantages. In the interim, sundry experts worry over whether formal testing is appropriate for online reading, texting, and time wasting. There is no conclusion. Perhaps my problem with this article begins with the fact that I “read” it online.

Anatomy Of The Funny Bone

A couple of days ago, a group discussion among the A.B. authors about blogging matters degenerated quickly into a somewhat lengthy exchange of jokes and a brief analysis of what makes us laugh. I was reminded of that late day e-mail thread with my co-bloggers when I came upon a book review (not a favorable one) in the New York Times. In his book, Stop Me If You've Heard This : A History and Philosophy of Jokes, author Jim Holt attempts to understand and explain the workings of the human funny bone through the ages. 

We know that Yorick was a fellow of infinite jest. But what exactly was his boffo material? Did he slay them with borscht-belt one-liners, or did he stick to observational humor — Seinfeld-like riffs on the miseries of Danish weather? Alas, we cannot know. But it seems fairly certain that even melancholy Danes prized a choice punch line, like the Romans and the Greeks before them.

In “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This,” his wispy inquiry into the history and philosophy of jokes, Jim Holt offers up a choice one from ancient times. Talkative barber to customer: “How shall I cut your hair?” Customer: “In silence.”

Bada-bing.

This knee-slapper comes from “Philogelos,” or “Laughter-Lover,” a Greek joke book, probably compiled in the fourth or fifth century A.D. Its 264 entries amount to an index of classical humor, with can’t-miss material on such figures of fun as the miser, the drunk, the sex-starved woman and the man with bad breath.

Let us not forget the “skolastikos,” or egghead: “An egghead was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. ‘Don’t cry,’ he consoled them, ‘I have freed you all in my will.’”

Bada-boom.

Holt, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, combs through a number of obscure texts, ancient and modern, in his fast-moving, idiosyncratic survey of humor and its vagaries through the ages. Unfortunately, the 150 joke anthologies compiled by Melissus in the Augustan age disappeared, but the Renaissance humor of Poggio Bracciolini survived — proof that fat jokes and fart jokes never grow old — as did numerous Elizabethan jest books.

Sculpting the Mind (Sujatha)

From an earlier discussion on memory, a chance wrong link sent me on the search for information on neuroscientist Ian H. Robertson. While I couldn't dig up the much quoted research article regarding the inability of younger people to remember phone numbers as well as the older generation(primarily on blogs, which ought to have thrown up a relevant hyperlink or two), I did come across a  bevy of  articles penned by Dr.Robertson as a columnist for the British Medical Journal, which whetted my appetite for more.

What Were They Thinking?

I haven't read the book - only seen a couple of reviews. As Sam Anderson says in the New York Books article, Intercourse, a collection of 50 stories by Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler, is a well written gimmick.  But a fine gimmick no doubt, because public interest in the sex lives of others is insatiable. The author tries to capture in his imagination the solitary thoughts of famous couples while they were ... well, copulating. The stories are not so much an account of physical intercourse or historic pillow talk, as "mental monologues" of the participants during sexual interludes. Given our knowledge of history and current affairs, the idea is at once funny and salacious. To cite a railroad analogy, the author attempts to map the life journeys of well known partners-in-passion through their individual streams of consciousness running on monorail tracks while their bodies coupled at required and prescribed physical junctions.

Robert Olen Butler’s new story collection, Intercourse, is, as its title suggests, totally about doing it. It imagines the thoughts of 50 iconic couples as they knock the proverbial boots, beginning with Adam and Eve copulating on “a patch of earth cleared of thorns and thistles, a little east of Eden,” and ending with Santa Claus blowing off postholiday steam in January 2008 by doing the nasty with an 826-year-old elf in the back room of his workshop. But, as the clinical tone of Butler’s title also suggests, Intercourse is very much not a work of erotica. It tends to ignore messy fluids and crotch-logistics in favor of wordplay and psychological nuance. The book proceeds through twinned vignettes—complementary stream-of-consciousness prose-poems paired across facing pages, with the primal physical act implied in the margins between. (When you close the book, each of the couples gets pressed together.)

Besides Adam and Eve, the storied couples into whose heads Butler tries to take his readers are as disparate as Leda & Zeus of Greek mythology, Mary Magdalene (with a Roman centurion) of Biblical lore, Cleopatra & Mark Anthony of ancient history as well as modern day star crossed couples like Prince Charles & Princess Diana and Robert Kennedy & Marilyn Monroe. Among political couples currently in the news whose bedroom ruminations the author imagines are George W. and Laura Bush. Predictably the former thinks belligerent and ungrammatical thoughts while the latter safely dwells on bland home decorating notions. Yes, yes, Bill and Hillary are there too - circa 1971. While Bill may have heard Coltrane in his head while contemplating the young woman who would be his bride, Hillary, according to Butler was hearing a completely different musical refrain. 

The ballsiest vignette, the “oh, snap” moment that will make you hunch over protectively on the subway and possibly Google the basic legal definition of slander, is Butler’s depiction of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham as striving twentysomething law students: “this had to be done eventually,” Hillary thinks, and goes on to fantasize about sex on the floor of the Oval Office—“I don’t care if that’s the next time we do this, to be honest with myself, but I choose this time and I will choose some others in between because one day we’ll be fucking on the eagle and there’s a soft knock at the door and the secretary knows not to barge in and she says Madame President, the Soviet premier is on the phone.” Although it’s predictable— perhaps even because it’s predictable—the episode feels convincing, and even, in the dusk of our overheated never-ending primary, poignant. Hillary’s dispassionate scheming is right out of central casting, and recalls all the book’s other political lovers, from Eve to Cleopatra to Henry VIII. Butler seems to be telling us that repetition, above all, is the essence of humankind’s perpetual bump and grind. And, in a world in which all the secrets are out, perhaps the greatest art lies in making us blush anew at what we already know.