Suddenly there are links

Hello. It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long time. There are things I've been reading and liking on twitter and then I thought of this place so here are links to things.

1. Bezwada Wilson, who won the Magsaysay Award recently, in an interview with Business Standard (behind the paywall, unfortunately. I'm not even sure how I managed to read the whole thing, but I did, via someone on twitter) strongly critical of the PM and the Guajarat Govt and it's police. Words to the effect of how the PM saying 'don't shoot them, shoot me' is silly theatrics because the ruling party, being a majority, should be perfectly capable of making sure the rule of law is obeyed. He also talks about the protests in Una, among other things.

2. Madhusree Mukerjee's review of Sonia Faleiro's 13 Men. Faleiro's book is an investigation into the reported gang rape of an adivasi girl in Subalpur. Mukerjee, who also investigated the event in depth, has several critiques to make of Faleiro's book.

As it happens, I have also investigated the case at length, and studied the available documents in their original script (English and Bengali). I concluded, however, that the official story, which is also Faleiro’s, is about as believable as the tiger story in Life of Pi. It’s such a thrilling story, though – such a perfect fit with mainstream notions of rural primitivism, which we, as the ‘modern’ and the ‘enlightened’, are striving to eradicate – that it effortlessly assumes the mantle of truth. A rape may have indeed taken place (it is hard to know for sure) but the evidence adduced to convict all 13 men, and even more significantly, to condemn systems of justice that are crucial to adivasi identity and autonomy, is exceedingly thin. In what follows I will tell both stories, including some evidence that Faleiro left out, and let the reader decide whether justice has been served or ravished.

3. Arul Mani, entertaining as always, on Brahman Naman (a film I should watch, I think). It's the kind of writing that still needs some kind of a long form blog platform, thank god. No tweeting or tumbling this kind of a piece.

This, we find, is Ash, a girl whose braces seem to glint only to reflect how dazzled she is with Naman. Her face is forever a flower opening out in mute offering. In these opening moments she is framed in the humiliations of the gaze that the boys direct at her. Being interested and available is one disability. Being quite unlike the more pneumatic creatures who gallop in slo-mo through their imagination is her other disability.

And yet this derisory gaze is a bit of a red herring. The same camera is ambiguous about whether the crucial answer that wins them the quiz (Mills and Boon) comes from Naman, or from her.  She is a trouper, and does not let being whacked aside like a rubber ball deter her from trying again. The film eventually allows us to step aside and see her as she is.

This rara avis of those benighted times we shall call the pioneer-hudugi. Who stood out not because she wore shady matching-matching outfits as she zipped past on a Kinetic, but because she was expert at ignoring pecking orders, and scaling walls, real and metaphorical, in those very outfits. I have known several, and learnt, slowly, to treasure and admire the superior fire that they carried within. Sindhu Sreenivasa Murthy plays exactly such a pioneer-hudugi to note-perfection, reaching deep to find awkwardness and a kind of raw grace. Her Ash wears the wrong clothes, sourced from the wrong regional language films, and says the wrong things (‘It’s an honour to quiz with you, Naman.’) but brings dil [20] and a sure sense of self to the small job of climbing out of the well that the disdain of the boy-talent in her world consigns her to. The film is as much about her as it is about Brahman Naman.

 Also, there are a million footnotes.

4. After ages and ages, Adoor Gopalakrishnan has a new film, Pinneyum. In an interview today in the Hindu, he is asked if he watches new films. And he says:

Only if they have something special. I don’t have the patience or time to sit through most of them.

Mm hmm.

4. Oh,ok. Looks like that's it for now. There were other things but those are to say and not to link to, so that's another post. 

5. ETA: Oooh! Via Nilanjana, this essay on Saki by one of my favourite contemporary children's writers, Katherine Rundell (If you haven't read Rooftoppers and The Wolf Wilder, rectify this immediately). This is probably the heart of Rundell's essay:

To read a Saki story is to hire an assassin. There have been many attempts in the last hundred years to re-create that specific Saki feeling; the pleasures of laying waste to convention combined with the quickening promise of something wilder in its stead. Nobody has yet managed it entirely, but in the pursuit of Saki a great deal of gleeful choler has been produced. If you were feeling ungenerous, you might compare the writing of an introduction to an animal marking out territory (the same could be said of writing essays for literary publications), and so it is with the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than Saki’s has in a hundred. Saki is often said to ring through the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, but Wodehouse turns his raw material into something far gentler than Saki did; there is kindness in Saki but not sweetness, and in a truly Sakian Wodehouse story, Bertie would be trapped under a piece of vintage furniture and torn apart by the dog Bartholomew. Coward and Saki do both give off-kilter advice, and they are at their most archetypal when laying down the law. Coward renders schoolboy humour urbane: ‘Never trust a man with short legs; his brains are too near his bottom.’ Saki is calmly outlandish: ‘Never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.’ The work in Coward’s quips is audible; in Saki’s it is undetectable. As with Donne, Nabokov and Spark, the mechanisms of wit are unseen and so inimitable.  

Oh, an Tipu Sultan's man-eating mechanical tiger puts in an appearance.






 

Posters and campaigns against sexual assault

Over the last few months, I've seen a number of posters for campaigns against sexual assault. No surprisingly, these are all in other countries than India. Every time I see a post, I intend to save it and then forget.

Now that there's some kind of critical mass surrounding rape, rape culture, sexual assault and so on, I thought it was time to go looking for those posters.

1. How To Prevent Rape/Sexual Assault

2. Don't Be That Guy

These are not culturally specific to India in a number of ways beyond the obvious ones. But the Don't Be That Guy campaigns have apparently been effective elsewhere. And guess what? They acknowledge that men also get raped and sexually assaulted. It would be fantastic if we could have variations of these, no?

Posters and posters.

3. Statement by Women's and Progressive Groups and Individuals.

Here is a fairly comprehensive statement with a list of demands that does not include the death penalty, chemical castration and other absurdities. What is does include is demands for police reform, more, and more effective gender sensitisation of not just the police or other government functionaries, but from the primary school and up.

No, sorry, this statement doesn't ask that action should include gender sensitisation from a very young age, but duh! That is clearly necessary. Also, by the time kids are old enough to protest, they might know better than to wave bangles at the cops to taunt them in order to get them to do their jobs better.

At any rate, though it's possible that the statement doesn't cover everything, if you agree with it, do consider signing it (email given in that post). And do pass it on.

4. Solidarity and PLUs

This is also a good time to remember that it's not just People Like Us who get assaulted: not just urban, middle-class, mostly higher-caste women and men who get assaulted and raped.

It's fantastic that people are out and protesting, but let's not expect solidarity for ourselves and be less ready to give it when it is dalit women, rural women, people in Kashmir or Manipur, women and men in custody.

Anu Ramdas has a great post on Round Table.

'Colonial history survives well in the mouth; it's warm there'

It's common in India for English speakers - we could even say native English speakers - to claim that they're past all this unease with the legacy of language, and all that post-colonial hand-wringing, and that sort of thing.

It's somewhat true, also, that much of what is written about matters of language tend to follow a well-worn path; I'm tired before I even begin. But every once in a while, someone writes something that renews old, stale insights. It's odd that so often this happens through personal histories and even odder that this is not a route taken more often (or maybe I just don't read enough).

Anyway. Found this essay by Eliane Castillo via Aisha and thought I'd link to and store this here:

But for my father, Ilokano wasn’t just a language he wanted to speak—but an entire space, a time. More specifically: an estranged space, an estranged time. And because none of the people who had lived in that space and time were with him, he refused to speak it, to produce it, either to my mother, or to me. The only time I heard him speak Ilokano was with one co-worker, a fellow security guard (and then, only reluctantly and sparingly); or on the phone with his siblings; or the one time when the two of us were in the Philippines together, during the second kidnapping of my life. (He was the one who kidnapped me. Not in an evil way. Well, not evil to me.)

But more than that, he refused, almost categorically, to speak Tagalog with my younger brother and me. He would not enter into the space of Tagalog with us. “It’s not my language,” he said firmly. Naturally, he thought of English as his own; it’s the second national language of the Philippines, after all. Colonial history survives well in the mouth; it’s warm there. Tropical.

See what I mean? Bang in the middle of a familiar narrative of estrangement in language and the claiming of spaces and times etc etc, there's 'the second kidnapping'.

(Plus, anyone who namechecks Tony Neung automatically has my full and passionate attention.)

Facetiousness aside, there's a lot there that makes me want to hug that post: I do the whole shifting accents thing too, depending on whom I am talking to and have often wished someone would theorise or at least explicate that; I like the idea of 'the cat in the throat'; language as prosthesis.

Just read, no?

Advance notice: War Horse

Yes, okay, so I'm going to watch War Horse on Sunday. The kid is the excuse, but I promise to retain an open mind - by which I mean, I anticipate that I will dislike the film immensely (despite its few compensations) and will duly report my experiences.

I realise, with horror, that I haven't written about any films since May or June last year*. Not even just to be nasty.

So in anticipation, and as preliminary preparation, I thought I'd remind you guys what it used to be like here when I talked cinema: Slumdog, Dasvidaniya, about the Asian Awards and so on.

Thank god for people like Banno, I tell you. (Here, for instance, just for your reading pleasure, is Banno on Ghajini. )

I'm in danger of forgetting I ever used to have anything to do with cinema.

So, I promise to bring despatches back from the front. Stay tuned.

__

*Announcements, naturally, don't count.

The Poet is In & Bhagat's toys are Taken Away

Mainly because I refuse to use the word 'random' to describe my posts, even though that is precisely what this is:

1. Approaching the question of poems and ownership from a completely different place, this post. Holly S. Morrison sits at a Farmer's Market (with a sign that says The Poet is In, as if she were in a Peanuts comic) and writes custom poems that people buy from her. And yet:

I browsed the honey and beeswax candles at a neighboring table while Holly began clacking away on her manual typewriter. And I found myself reflecting on her smiling response to the final question I had asked her: she doesn’t keep copies of the poems for herself. I found myself feeling an unexpected pang of jealousy at this detachment, this acceptance of letting poems go, as if I had encountered a monk making a sand mandala, or the street sax player in Joni Mitchell’s classic song, “For Free.”

Though I write for free and Holly writes for money, I only give away the writing of the poem; she relinquishes the right to keep the poem. Many contemporary poets might feel that selling poems devalues our art. But it seems to me that Holly’s approach to poetry also participates in the sublime economy Lewis Hyde describes in The Gift, the classic book that helped so many artists better understand their art and taught me, in my twenties, how to survive as a poet.

According to Hyde, the function of art is to participate in a sacred gift economy that links giver, receiver, and the spiritual world. Art’s gift offers contemporary humans an essential alternative to the deadening commercial system. But in practice, it’s not so simple for a poet to give away the gift of poetry nowadays. Those who receive our gifts tend to be limited to critics, students, or other poets; the gifts of a “professional” poet get tangled up in names, reputations, career obligations, and previous bodies of work.

By selling one-of-a-kind poems and not even keeping a copy, Holly moves poetry out of the literary economy in which so many contemporary poems are enmeshed. Instead, she moves it along into the lush marketplace of daily life where all of us can meet on a human footing, helping each other satisfy our needs for life’s irreplaceable gifts of food and beauty and meaning.

2. So there was the ToI Lit Carnival held recently in Bombay. Wish I'd been at the Mohammed Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, Chetan Bhagat session (I'd have been happy to have taken everyone else but Hanif out of the picture but hey - I'm sure I'm not the only one). It seems to have been pretty hilarious:

You know what? I can't quote anything specific from it. It is full of deliciousness, so go read.

Hint: Bhagat's toys are taken away.

Evan Calder Williams on the UK Riots

There are many, many readable and necessary posts about the riots in the UK, but I am only going to link to Evan Calder Williams. I admit my crush on the man, but I think you should read his whole post. He has a gift of eloquence that I admire and envy (you will notice I haven't called it a dangerous gift).

But we are in Janus times, albeit ones where the two faces are wrenching their shred head apart in an attempt to spit in the face of the other.

Riots are the other side of democracy, when democracy means the capacity and legitimacy to vote into place measures that directly wound the very population they purport to represent.

Looting is the other side of credit, when credit entails the desperate scrambling of states and institutions to preserve a good line, cost to those who might borrow that credit be damned.

[...]

2. This isn't fair

This is a common rejoinder, and again, it is entirely true.  Folded into it is a fully legitimate recognition of the damage and trauma being done, primarily through loss of property, to many who clearly are nowhere near rich, who also scrape to get by, who build up a small life over many years.

And for those who would ask us, in hopes of mocking us, yeah, but what if it was your house?  Your car?  Your shop? we say:

We would be furious.  We would be devastated.  How could we not?

[...]

And we are in a time in which such a double condition, of that which cannot be measured and that which cannot be accidental, rules.  It rules in the breakdown of sides,  of the metric of fairness, in the upsurge in the midst of all that we thought could be clearly divided.  It is a scrambling of poles of identity. One doesn't defend a riot.  It is not "good" or "bad."  A riot is a scrambling of positions of belonging and of judgment.
Often, it is an internal dissolution of what might have appeared common lines of class.

It involves situations the likes of which we are sure to see more, the turning of the hopelessly poor against the poor-but-just-getting-by, between shop-owners and looters, between workers and rioters,  between those  breaking the windows and those who clean them,  and, internally, between individuals themselves, who cannot always be split into one or the other.

Update: Part two of ECW's post here.

weekend reading

1. While we're still talking about A Free Man, here's Supriya Nair's review in Mint Lounge.

2. Rahul Bhatia in Open says The Injured Are Everywhere. Every blast conjures every other blast.

3." I think there is nothing more distracting than a head of gorgeous hair." All 'autobiographies' should be about Magneto (via SN).

4. John Ashbery's three word contribution: "Alice was tired.'

5. If you feel like contributing to this display of laziness, feel free.

6. Those of you in Hyd, come for at least one of Jayanta Mahapatra's readings!

My three words: that is all.

'Was that sincere enough?'

Via TR, commenting on KM's post, the story of how Blood on the Tracks got made.

*

There's this bit:

Lighting was a big deal in the rooms. It was all about setting the mood for creativity. I turned most of the lights off. All was black except a glow over the flying-V mixing console. Once you blocked out all external stimuli and you were listening for endless hours, the space between the beats got bigger and bigger. You could hear inside the sounds all the way to their core.

And I found myself nodding. Oh, yes. Sound studios are magical in a way editing studios aren't. Editing studios are noise and repetition, they're flicker and blindingness. There's no spotlight and then darkness. There's no awe.

In sound studios, you're always on the outside looking in. There is austerity and exclusion (as with the image of Zbignew Herbert on the cover). You're always on the other side of the glass. It's cold. You might even need a sweater. There are mysterious words that you're allowed to hear once in a while. On the screen, the images play themselves out in silence. Sound recording is liturgy.

I could spend morning, afternoon, evening and night

whiling away my time on this (so far, I've taken in Ah, Still Standing and Everybody Dies)

Or I could keep this (pdf) open and come back to it every once in a while.

Or! I could log off and get back to writing!

the sub-prime method of quotation

Via Ruchir Joshi on Facebook, this apparent 'controversy' over Godard's alleged anti-semitism and giving him an honorary Oscar (which of course, he didn't go to collect).

Following links from that piece, I found Bill Krohn's review of a recent biography of JLG written by Richard Brody*, in which he picks apart Brody's charges of anti-semitism (and other things).

The main threads of Brody’s approach are laid out in his discussion of Godard’s first two critical pieces. Citing an article about Joseph Mankiewicz that appeared in La Gazette du cinema for June 1950, he skips over Godard’s relatively in-depth discussions of two films, A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and House of Strangers (1949), to cherry-pick the idea that the article on Letter “is devoted less to his films than to Mankiewicz himself,” as shown by a single sentence: “This letter to three married women is also three letters to the same woman, one whom the director probably loved.” That way lies biographical reductivism.

The second selection of quotes comes from a more difficult piece, “Towards a Political Cinema,” which takes as its starting point newsreel images of young German Communists marching in a May Day celebration: “By the sole force of propaganda that was animating them, these young people were beautiful.” Brody again skips over the gist of this densely argued article to get to what interests him: “We could not forget Hitler Youth Quex, certain passages of films by Leni Riefenstahl, several shocking newsreels from the Occupation, the maleficent ugliness of The Eternal Jew. It is not the first time art is born of constraint.” And he concludes that Godard “took all fanaticisms to be alike and to be equally beautiful. Without equating the far left and the far right politically, Godard equated them aesthetically.”

Sliced and diced like a package of subprime mortgages, Godard’s questing thought becomes what Brody needs it to be, and in the process we may not even notice that the person who’s equating communism and fascism politically, by calling them both “fanaticisms,” is Brody. That’s ideological simplification with a vengeance. Cultural journalism is now in the driver’s seat.

 But hey - don't sit around watching me quote selectively. Go read!.

_

*All this is, like, last year. Not so recent, but whatever.

poems in nether

nether is a new quarterly published out of Bombay. They put up stuff every fortnight on their blog and bring out a print journal every quarter, that may or may not include what in the fortnightly but certainly has other writing, such as interviews and artwork.

I have two poems up on their blog this fortnight. It also brings home the trouble of posting things up here that later turn into poems. Ah, never mind. Go read.

weekend reading

Mid-week was for goofing off but now that the weekend is upon is - and a gorgeously crisp and sunny Saturday it is too - here's some reading I've been doing.

1. Aaron Bady on Granta's Pakistan issue: 'The Language of Developmental Literature'. The beginning of that essay provides links to the original essays that set this post off. Each of those links is worth checking out. Indian writers should be paying close attention to those posts.

2. Zadie Smith on The Social Network and You Are Not a Gadget.

3. J.H. Prynne on the difficulties in translating 'difficult' poetry. [pdf].

Enjoy!

poetry has direct designs on us

Don Paterson, talking about Shakespeare's sonnets and the commentaries he's recently written on them:

In the end, putting together a guide to the sonnets, I decided I'd write it in the form of a diary. That's to say I read the sonnets as you would any other book, fitting them round my work routine and domestic obligations. So rather than lock myself in the library for six months, I wrote my commentaries on the poems while awake, bored, half-asleep, full of cold, drunk, exhausted, serene, smart, befuddled and stupid. I wrote on the train, in bed, in the bath and in my lunch-break; I wrote them while I was fed up marking papers, or stuck on Bioshock on the Playstation, while I was watching the bairns, Family Guy or the view out of the window.

The idea was to find a way of giving the sonnets more of a direct and personal reading than they usually receive. This requires making a firm distinction between two kinds of reading. Most literary criticism, whether academic or journalistic, is ideally geared up for "secondary reading" – by which I mean all that stuff that requires us to generate some kind of secondary text – a commentary, an exegesis, a review and so on. By contrast, a primary reading doesn't have to articulate its findings. It engages with the poem directly, as a piece of trustworthy human discourse – which doesn't sound too revolutionary, but the truth is that many readers don't feel like that about poetry any more, and often start with: "But what does it all mean?" on the assumption that "that's how you read poetry".

But that isn't the kind of the first reading most poems hoped they were going to get. The poem has much more direct designs on us. Its plan was to make us weep or change our opinion of something forever. The sonnets are no different, but currently give the appearance of being approachable only via a scholarly commentary. 

I've long been fascinated by Paterson's inclination toward the idea of the poem as mystical and sentient, with its own subjective designs on the reader, and the poet as shaman or medium. I'm fairly certain I don't agree with that view, but I acknowledge its attraction. [See his TS Eliot Lecture that I've linked to in this post.]

After (ɔ)

 McKenzie Wark, Author of A Hacker Manifesto, on.Copygift.

On the one side, a vast social movement has arisen that intuits the significance of digital information as a social fact. In its more public and self-conscious forms, this social movement includes Creative Commons, the Open Source and Free Software Movement. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Submerged out of sight is a vast culture of file sharing, whether using torrents or plain old CDs passed from hand to hand. This private, pervasive new economy—a gift economy in which the artefact is nothing and its digital information everything—might be an even more significant part of this social movement than its more publicly declared aspects.

On the other side are the entrenched interests of the corporate world, which, particularly in the ‘overdeveloped’ countries of Europe, Japan and North America, rely more and more on their portfolios of trademarks, patents, copyrights and on trade-secret law to stay in business. In A Hacker Manifesto I argue that these corporations are the legal expression of a new kind of class interest. No longer a capitalist class, but a vectoralist class. The key to their power is not physical capital such as factories and warehouses, but rather vectors through which they control information such as the logistics of the supply chain, and the brands, patents and copyrights under which a company’s wealth of information is protected. The vectoralist class only incidentally sells things. It sells images, ideas, data, strapped willy-nilly onto things you can buy, from T-shirts to DVDs, from pills to iPods.

Caught between the social movement of free culture and the corporate interests of this vectoralist class are what I called the hacker class. Not just computer hackers, but anyone who makes new information, whether as a scientist or artist or writer or musician. It doesn’t matter what medium. As far as the corporations are concerned it’s all much the same anyway. This hacker class, this creative cohort, has interests that are really closer to the social movement for free culture and the new gift economies it is spontaneously creating. Intellectual property presents itself as being about the interests of the ‘creator’, but it is really about the interests of the ‘owner’. In practice, making a work of music or art or a new drug is not something you can do on your own. You need help from the owners of the vectors along which it might be distributed. So you sell your rights as a creator to those who own the means of realising its value—the vectoralist class.

Via Supriya Nair.

The Copyleft symbol in the title courtesy a friend on Facebook

Two Minutes Older: Two Approaches to Bhopal

Just thinking about the Bhopal verdict makes me despair. If the worst industrial accident in the history of this country can be treated in such a cavalier manner, with every indication – going by the Nuclear Liability Bill – that lessons are wilfully not being learned, what can we hope for?

From the law and the institutions associated with it, the answer is: not much. I will resist the temptation to quote Dickens here. Instead, I will invoke Gandhi. In 1922, he was arrested for ‘attempting to excite disaffection’ against the British government on the basis of three articles he wrote in Young India. In his statement to the judge of the Bombay High Court, Gandhi pleaded guilty on all charges. “The only course open to you, the Judge, is […] either to resign your post, or inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and law you are assisting to administer are good for the people". He also said, "I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system."

Many things have changed since 1922. For one thing, being a democracy, we can no longer openly acknowledge that the law serves, not justice, but those in power – as it always has done. It is capable of acting swiftly when it wants to – such as when it made it possible for Warren Anderson to leave the country. Equally, it is capable of a superb, deliberate bungling: after 26 years Bhopal is, in the eyes of the judiciary, the equivalent of a traffic accident.

If we believe that the central figures in this tragedy ought to be the people who died that night in December 1984, or those who suffered and still suffer severe health problems with no affordable healthcare in sight, or those who still drink the water contaminated from the chemicals that leached into the ground in subsequent decades, we are clearly wrong. What the people of Bhopal need is not justice but – according to the US Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake – ‘closure’. Some newspaper editors clearly agree; an editorial in the Indian Express suggests that we build a memorial to the dead and then move on.

As extralegal activism goes, it’s hilarious. As a solution, it’s a pretty rotten one.

*

People frequently demand solutions. ‘What’s the solution?’ they ask, impatient for results! action! (even closure!) If something is wrong and someone is complaining, it is clearly not enough to talk it out and think it through. There must be a tangible outcome of all this bleeding-heart talk and thought – even if it’s only a memorial. After all, in the absence of outcomes, how is one to quiet the conscience, put it all behind and return to the alluring call of the daily grind?

There! I said the word: conscience. Real change requires that we examine our conscience – a Pandora’s Box out of which emerge words such as ethics and morality. These are words that have fallen into disuse, but the present is always a good time to polish and wield them again.

We have grown used to thinking most things are someone else’s responsibility; that, once we have paid our taxes, we have done our civic duty. To bring the conscience into public life is to acknowledge that our responsibilities are more far-reaching than we had supposed. It is not enough to want the law to do something; we have to do something ourselves, every time, both individually and collectively.

Action is not difficult: where Bhopal is concerned, there are many ways to help and can be found at bhopal.net. But action is easy enough – there is always something to be done, in some way.

The really difficult thing about using one’s conscience is that it will not let one rest. There can be no talk of closure because one does not cease to be responsible. And this is precisely why it can be a more effective alternative to waiting and expecting the law to work. The law is not set in stone. It can change course. It’s our job to see that the course is not one of least resistance.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.) 

**

Extra reading

In no particular order. These are things I was thinking about while writing this piece

1. Hari Batti'' Bhopal post (of which there are many, but I'm picking this one). 

2. Juan Cole, talking about oil, but there are things about responsibility in there. [H/T: JP]

3. Rajesh Kasturirangan on expanding the moral commons.

4. Ananya Vajpeyi's review of Mithi Mukherjee's India in the Shadows of Empire: A Legal and Political History 1774-1950.

5. From SACW, a letter to Obama.

6. Mitali Saran's excellent column from a week or more ago.


**


I have to confess a certain discomfort with my use of the word 'we', as if I knew exactly who I was speaking for. My own inaction doesn't translate into everyone else's, nor can I claim to speak for more than a small number of people.

I also realise that I am sticking my neck out considerably, writing the way I am. I consider this a risk worth taking, however. At any rate, it feels better than wittering on about mangoes.

misc

1. Mangoes. I claimed, in public, that I could take them or leave them. There was widespread consternation. Someone said (I think), "next you'll say you like karela." I replied, "I love karela." More shocked silence.

2. When you're pregnant and you know it clap your hands. Oh - that's not right, is it?

3. Interplanetary Shock Doctrine.

4. Which brings me to a round-up of latest haunts:

a) Where JP sets his stories free.

b) Where I check in at least once a day, despite the convenience of feed readers.

c) Across the Universe*. Anyone who uses Fukuoaka as a good luck charm has my devotion.

__

*Thanks, Amruta.

Weerasethakul and an interview with JLG

So glad Uncle Boonmee won the Palme d'Or.

Here's:

A general interview.

An older one from Reverse Shot.

And some links.

**

Oh, and a fantastic interview with JLG here:

LALANNE: You don't claim any rights over the images that any artists might be lifting from your films?

GODARD: Of course not. Besides, people are doing it, putting them up on the Internet, and for the most part they don't look very good... But I don't have the feeling that they're taking something away from me. I don't have the Internet. Anne-Marie [Miéville, his partner, and a filmmaker —JML] uses it. But in my film, there are images that come from the Internet, like those images of the two cats together.

LALANNE: For you, there's no difference in status between those anonymous images of cats that circulate on the Internet, and the shot from John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn that you're also making use of in Film Socialisme?

GODARD: Statutorily, I don't see why I'd be differentiating between the two. If I had to plead in a court of law against charges of filching images for my films, I'd hire two lawyers, with two different systems. The one would defend the right of quotation, which barely exists for the cinema. In literature, you can quote extensively. In the Miller [Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller, 1976 —JML] by Norman Mailer, there's 80% Henry Miller, and 20% Norman Mailer. In the sciences, no scientist pays a fee to use a formula established by a conference. That's quotation, and cinema doesn't allow it. I read Marie Darrieussecq's book, Rapport de police [Rapport de police, accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction / Police Report: Accusations of Plagiarism and Other Modes of Surveillance in Fiction, 2010], and I thought it was very good, because she went into a historical inquiry of this issue. The right of the author — it's really not possible. An author has no right. I have no right. I have only duties. And then in my film, there's another type of "loan" — not quotations, but just excerpts. Like a shot, when a blood-sample gets taken for analysis. That would be the defense of my second lawyer. He'd defend, for example, my use of the shots of the trapeze artists that come from Les Plages d'Agnès. This shot isn't a quotation — I'm not quoting Agnès Varda's film: I'm benefiting from her work. I'm taking an excerpt, which I'm incorporating somewhere else, where it takes on another meaning: in this case, symbolizing peace between Israel and Palestine. I didn't pay for that shot. But if Agnès asked me for money, I figure it would be for a reasonable price. Which is to say, a price in proportion with the economy of the film, the number of spectators that it reaches...

[...]

LALANNE: Is the idea of accomplishing a body of work, one which life granted you the time to complete, a matter that weighs upon you?

GODARD: No. I don't believe in the body of work. There are works, they might be produced in individual installments, but the body of work as a collection, the great oeuvre, I have no interest in it. I prefer to speak in terms of pathways. Along my course, there are highs and there are lows, there are attempts... I've towed the line a lot. You know, the most difficult thing is to tell a friend that what he's done isn't very good. I can't do it. Rohmer was brave enough to tell me at the time of the Cahiers that my critique of Strangers on a Train was bad. Rivette could say it too. And we paid a lot of attention to what Rivette thought. As for François Truffaut, he didn't forgive me for thinking his films were worthless. He also suffered from not ending up finding my films as worthless as I thought his own were.

Annie Finch's Kegels for Poets

= joy!

When your meter muscles get regular and varied exercise you will find that it actually turns you on poetically. You will better be able to identify and distinguish your lyric G-spot and creative muscles in addition to stimulating your poetic clitoris without even touching yourself! As you perfect these exercises and strengthen the muscles you’ll begin to notice that you can isolate distinctly separate groups of metrical muscles in your poetic floor, including your dactylic, anapestic, trochaic, and iambic muscles. This kind of awareness enables you to isolate your poetic clitoris, for instance, and stimulate yourself poetically at any time. It’s an excellent trick for getting yourself “juiced up” for a hot inspirational experience or important occasional poem. You may even be able to train yourself to have amazing poetic orgasms in this manner. Meter exercises increase blood flow to the poetic region, which aids in the increased flow of inspiration and helps engorge the creative area. With increased blood supply and stronger muscles we prep ourselves for better, stronger and more amazing poetic orgasms. Our lyric G-spot is directly energized and stimulated.

Men – Every bit of the above applies to you, too. Having strong PM muscles aids in stronger lyric erections, lasting longer, increased libido and they help massage the Inspirational Prostate, too.

The whole thing here.

While reading, try not to mix up your epic similes with your extended metaphors.

**

In other news, it's So. Fucking. Hot! Over 40C every day for the last week or so, and 42.4C yesterday. If I've disappeared it's because there's been an incident of spontaneous combustion and someone should come and pick up the pieces.

Or do I mean put out the fire? I need to go do Kegels.

Five days with DFW

And two interviews about the book.

[Via]

Earlier, DFW.

kind of blue

 "Turnbull’s Blue—Antwerp Blue—Berlin Blue—Prussiate of Iron—Chinese Blue—Saxon Blue—Blau de Berlin"...

...but see for yourself.

[via]