Repression and Literature

James Wood writes a review in The New Yorker of a novel of an Iranian novelist living in the United States. The review is mildly interesting, though I'm not inspired enough to get Shahriar Mandanipour's book. But Wood opens his review with a savvy observation about the relationship between restriction and literary creativity:

Sometimes, the soft literary citizens of liberal democracy long for prohibition. Coming up with anything to write about can be difficult when you are allowed to write about anything.... Nothing constrains us. Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. What if writing were made a bit more exigent for us? What if we had less of everything? It might make our literary culture more “serious,” certainly more creatively ingenious. Instead of drowning in choice, we would have to be inventive around our thirst. Tyranny is the mother of metaphor, and all that.

I've read similar comments about the state of American literature: suburban, minivan ordinariness. I've heard it also said that in the Western hemisphere the most time-worthy novels come out of Latin America. I'm sure it's not so black and white, but I can see the reality alluded to in this quote above.

The Meaning of the Moonwalk

It's always interesting to see how swift and how far and wide the blow darts of media hype can fly. I first heard of the news of Michael Jackson's collapse on AlJazeera. It was breaking news in Doha and just about every other Arab city that carries the news network. In no time, after it was confirmed that he had died and after Jermaine Jackson made his moving statement, Muslim bloggers and notable figures alike have had something to say about the man, mainly because of his alleged, reported, suggested, rumored, or bona fide conversion to Islam. The Michael Jackson story is, of course, hardly hype alone. The man was big for many reasons that we're all familiar with. And I don't think it's because the cult of celebrity has become the national religion. Michael Jackson actually "said" something about modern life, whether he meant to convey it or not.

Artists, as they say, lose interpretative control over their art. Picasso's paintings, for example, tell of the disconnect and disjointedness of the modern human mind and the life of disproportion and of a severe crisis of emphasis. His depictions of human anatomy, those circus freaks, reveal a diaspora at the level of limbs and body bulges.

Look at Michael’s moonwalk, his most mimicked move. Unintentional or otherwise, it is the postmodern view of progress: the motions of walking forward while actually moving in reverse, a regression marketed as advancement, steps ahead.

It's been widely reported that Michael in recent years has turned his attention to review his spiritual condition. I hope it's true, and if so, I hope it bodes well for him, as his fans emulate his moves of old and as music promoters struggle to save their investments.

Between Two Abysses

Coming across a good passage of words is like walking out of your home and beholding something spectacular in the sky, like a crimson sunset or a majestic halo around a full moon. You want to rush back to tell your family and friends to put down their smokes and Monopoly cards to "see this!" I like this quote here by Philip Zaleski, editor of Parabola Magazine and The Best American Spiritual Writing series. It resonates with a few verses of the Quran that speak of competing disparate conditions of a human being, the two "roads" available to him or her, for example.

The greatest art considers the human being sub specie aeternitatis,[*] in the light of eternity. In doing so, it discloses both our meanness and our majesty, in keeping with Pascal's dictum that we dwell between two abysses, the Infinite and the Nothing, that every person is "nothing in comparison with the infinite, an all in comparison with the nothing, a mean between nothing and everything." Art that sustains this transcendent perspective, percieving in us both angel and beast ... offers us, each time we stand before it, more truth about ourselves, about the cosmos, and about the relation of the one to the other. On rare occasions, it may even hand us the keys to our existence.

--From the Philip Zaleski's foreword to the 2006 edition of The Best American Spiritual Writing.

* Sub specie aeternitatis, from the Philosophical Dictionary, Latin for "under the aspect of eternity"; hence ... an honorific expression describing what is universally and eternally true, without any reference to or dependence upon the merely temporal portions of reality. In clearer English, sub specie aeternitatis roughly means "from the perspective of the eternal". Even more loosely, the phrase is used to describe an alternate or objective point of view. (Wiki)

Ibn Battuta Earthwork

Interesting tribute to Ibn Battuta in unlikely Kansas. If he were alive, he'd probably want to travel there. Stan Herd is the artist behind the "earthwork." (Thanks for the help in embedding this video properly. See comment 1 below.)

Servants of Power

At the recommendation of a close friend, I've started to read Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. I am drawn to read it also because of what Noam Chomsky (an over-quoted gentleman) had to say about the book, as related on the front cover: "Edward Said helps us to understand who we are and what we must do if we are to aspire to be moral agents, not servants of power."

If Said’s book can really do that, then we all need to read it. Like now. This phrase “servants of power” is something to keep in mind. I'm not sure "exactly" what it entails or where its conclusions ultimately march to, but some things are not meant to be learned with the precision of a watchmaker. What comes to my mind is this: Muslim Americans awkwardly attempting to figure out things related to identity and their relationship to a larger and powerful cultural vortex. It's possible for people to unwittingly become “servants of power” when they espouse such progressive-seeming, independent-appearing work (or terminologies) like reform or a certain identity or even tradition, that vague but often-trumpeted word.

I’m still in the introduction of the book. By all signs, it’s going to take a while to read it, and it’s not because I’m a slow reader (which I am, and slow walker, too), but for the fact that when you read something that speaks about an issue that’s very big and that gives form to something that has been roving around in your mind as a nebulous disquieting feeling, you want to read carefully.

Here are a couple of excerpts so far:

Readers of this book will quickly discover that narrative is crucial to my argument here, my basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history....

The power to narrative, or to block narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.

Fish on God

Stanley Fish of the New York Times writes again about "God Talk." Fish's articles on religion are interesting, and he has become a person to dislike among "new atheism" authors because Fish calls them out on what they don't know and how they gleefully still write about it. Fish's column is a good, quick read. It's not the only "fish" in the sea on this topic (couldn't resist), but his articles get good traction.

Gilead and Ms. Robinson

Some of you may have read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. It’s really a very nice read, often profound, and generally just well done. The technique of the narrative has been used quite a bit: a letter from someone to someone else, usually an elderly person writing for his or her own posterity. The narrator of the Pulitzer winning Gilead is an old preacher who married and fathered late in life. He writes a long letter to his rather young son telling him a story about the preacher's father, grandfather, atheistic sibling, wife, morose preacher friends, church flock, and ordinary things about life and their connections to religion, God, history, and imminence.

Now, there are risks in writing these kind of “letter-to-someone” narratives. Any flaws in the story-telling or writing itself become magnified when you choose a cliché form. You run the risk of sounding trite. Robinson has something important to say, pointed observations that we all probably have sensed or thought of, but were unsure of ourselves to think highly of them, so we let them go or belittle them because we haven’t learned how to receive “inspiration” that comes to ourselves in the real sense of the word.

Here's a passage that I’ve underlined in her book. I like it, but there are dozens of sidebars to the narrative that make the book layered and nuanced. The narrator, the old preacher, says out of the blue, a good color for writers:

This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success. I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eight decades walking around in it. People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that’s true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That’s clearer to me every day. Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes—old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable. What of me will I still have? Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion. Like Balaam’s ass, it’s seen the angel I haven’t seen yet, and it’s lying down in the path.

Thanks for reading this. Enjoy your Saturday.

Along the Bosphorus

We took many photos during our trip to Istanbul. Most of them are of the usual suspects: domes, minarets, and colored mounds of spices and stuff. But this one is my favorite. I took it on a boat ride down (or up) the Bosphorus or Bosporus, a marine strait that separates European Istanbul from its Asian half. Hope you like it.

In Istanbul

I've never been to Istanbul before, though I've wanted to for a long time. Badly. I'm here for a conference. Signs of the city's imperial past and swagger are hard to miss. The adhan here is actually "awesome." The words expand the sky, especially "ashahadu anna Muhammadan rasulu'llah." Don't know why, but that phrase arrests. The twin testimonies: one affirms the primordial, changeless Truth, and the other protects its endurance and its place in a temporal setting, the bazaar of distractions, i.e., world.

Good kebabs in Istanbul, too.

First Outrage: Reminiscing

(Seymour Hersh)
My oldest memory of political outrage was about the massacre in My Lai, Viet Nam in the late 60’s. I was not more than 10 years old when the story broke some time after the gruesome fact. I remember bringing to class a magazine (most likely Life Magazine) with photos of the corpses of children, women, and men. (I’m not sure how I got the magazine or how my parents let me take it.) I have a solid recollection of indignation when one of my classmates defended the massacre with some kind of security argument that he must have borrowed from his parents the night before. I held up a photo of dead toddlers and asked him, “Do these babies look dangerous?” My teacher said nothing, but had a smile of approval ... at last. She was quietly proud of me. I remember her face to this moment. Then she readjusted her face and told us to stop arguing.

I didn’t know it at the time, but journalist Seymour Hersh was instrumental in exposing My Lai and American military culpability. Recently, Sy Hersh, the most respected investigative journalist in America, spoke to our journalism students here in Qatar and gave a narration of his reportage and its mixture of doggedness, smarts, and luck. The coverage handed him a Pulitzer Prize. I had never met him before. I’m glad I did. Recall Hersh’s recent article (a couple of years back) in the New Yorker that exposed the Bush Administration’s plan (alleged, I should say) to attack Iran. Hersh’s article put a damper on the plans, many speculate. Probably true.

Well, you got to be angry at times. What’s “anger” for? To overstate and under-support, I have to believe that many of the problems we have are about misplaced angry: passive about oppression and, ah, torture, but wild about silly things not much worse than spilt milk. I’m very disappointed that Obama is not actively seeking out prosecution for torture-gate. There’s no high ground in that. None.