A little shyness goes a long way
Salman Rushdie is a mean writer. He writes books like very few other people can, positively shining on every page. But I somehow feel that he would be a very poor rapper.
It came to my attention through the blog of Austin Kleon of the Newspaper Blackout Poems fame that Kanye West, a rapper, former college dropout and self-proclaimed proud non-reader of books, has… well, published a book, called “Kanye West presents Thank You And You’re Welcome”, sired in collaboration with a ghost-writer J. Sakiya Sandifer.
One should not judge a book by its cover so I braced myself to go and hunt it down somewhere in Palo Alto bookstores – a valiant attempt that was ultimately doomed to failure and caused some mildly embarrassing moments at Stanford bookstore when I was trying to explain a very helpful salesperson what exactly am I looking for.
Thus I have no alternative but to rely on the review above (and few more rather venomous reader opinions at amazon.com) – which is possibly no big loss as, apart from the covers, the teaspoon-deep book consists of 52 pages of “thoughts and theories” many of which are empty and even those that aren’t might as well be. Which is hardly surprising considering that the author – or should I say presenter – loathes books saying that “sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed”. Amen, brother.
I mean, it’s fine not to like books for them being so “wordy” and think that it is better to “get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life” – nothing wrong with that. But people who think that “being a non-reader is helpful when writing a book because it gave one a childlike purity” really should stick with rapping or whatever else they do and NOT write books for other people who actually like them being not only “wordy” but also not completely devoid of any meaning and content.
It is a situation in fact similar to a condition suffered unaware by certain new aspiring students of philosophy, who have somehow gotten an idea that philosophy is something best done on one’s own and preferably uncontaminated by the thoughts of people who have tried to deal with same issues in the past – as then the originality of the thinking would inevitably suffer. The result of such an endeavor more often than not carries a similar quality of “childlike purity” and while no doubt a source of much joy and self-realization for the person in question it causes a lot of embarrassment and torture to everyone else exposed to the eventual results.
Dedicating the book to his late mother, Kanye West is quoted saying “My mom taught me to believe in my flyness and conquer my shyness. She raised me to be the voice to allow people to think for themselves, to find their own way.” Thank God that Mrs. Rushdie didn’t press upon little Salman’s flyness to the extent that he would have concquered his shyness to become a rapper.
What is at stake
The topic of gay marriage has been making constant headlines in California since the day I arrived here – which was when the local beauty pageant winner Carrie Prejean – promptly dubbed as Miss Guided after her spirited defense of her constitutional right to infringe on other people’s rights – took her stand against the same-sex marriage. And now on this week Tuesday, the Court of California upheld the state ban on same sex marriages which caused an outrage in the US gay community and is a topic of many a cafe and wine-bar conversations here in Palo Alto.
I have been following the debate out of the sheer entertainment value – as people such as Miss California Prejean as well as others eventually feel that they have to somehow justify and back up their opinion on precisely WHY should marriage be an affair between man and woman exclusively. And this is where I am yet to see a line of reasoning which is beyond the trivial “because it has always been so” and wouldn’t end up with the person stating it making a complete ass of him- or herself. It is also lovely to see people who have been on front pages in connection with their extra-maritial affairs, such as Rudy Guiliani, speaking of the sanctity of marriage and how it should remain between a man and woman (apparently with a possible provisio of “between a man and women” or “between a man and a woman with some romantic overlap”).
A true gem in the crown of anti-gay-marriage rhetoric is an article by certain Sam Schulman titled The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage: It isn’t going to work. Reading the whole hilarous piece one would come to two inevitable conclusions – 1) the author has probably been dropped on his head for several times during the vulnerable period of developing mental capabilities in his childhood and 2) he has never met a gay person in his life. It is a spectacular piece of bigotry that deserves to be read in its entirety but disregarding for a moment his ramblings on (apparently sacred) kinship structure and how gay marriage will wreck havoc with it, the central point on his argument homes in on a notion of marriage as a kind of a sacrifice of freedom to bang every member of the opposite (or same, if that’s your cup of tea) sex – that straight people somehow lose when getting married but gay people retain. This is the subject of the crescendo in the last paragraph of the article:
Can gay men and women be as generous as we straight men are? Will you consider us as men who love, just as you do, and not merely as homophobes or Baptists? Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system–a system from which you have been spared. Imitate our self-surrender. If gay men and women could see the price that humanity–particularly the women and children among us–will pay, simply in order that a gay person can say of someone she already loves with perfect competence, “Hey, meet the missus!”–no doubt they will think again. If not, we’re about to see how well humanity will do without something as basic to our existence as gravity.
Coming from someone who has taken Shelley’s longest journey three times, Sam Schulman is objecting on gay people robbing the solemn aura of sincerity from his three past vows (and possible future ones) to be bound to his wife ‘Til Death Do Us Part’- this really had me giggling aloud.
But here is an altogether different view on the grave dangers of gay marriage – which points out a potentially disastrous result of allowing gay people subjecting themselves to the banal and soul-crushing experience of heterosexual marriage. Given that gay people currently make (and indeed, have made in the past) most of our culture, the results of this could be truly horrendous for all of us.
Enormously pleased
So I finished not one but two books today – Giorgio Agamben’s The State of Exception that I had been reading for a couple of days, and Luis Ferdando Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans that I started only yesterday. Agamben was rather exceptionally good and thought-provoking, and surprisingly readable at that – a rare treat among the good books of philosophy and thus comes highly recommended.
Regarding Verissimo’s little book: if you happen to be a fan of either Borges or Poe – or especially if you happen to like both – then do yourself a favour and get it. The whole book is a homage to those two writers (JLB in particular) and their different short stories, with plenty of others such as Lewis Carroll, H. P. Lovecraft, and a 17th century occultist writer John Dee thrown in for a good measure, and further peppered with references to yet more characters, books and stories, both known and obscure. If you know all this stuff, it is great fun. Unfortunately this also means that if you don’t, you really need not to apply – I’m afraid that for someone who hasn’t read Borges, Poe or Carroll – or doesn’t like them – Verissimo’s short novel would probably be very silly and tedious.
I will have to be in LA by June 11th, so that leaves me almost two weeks that I have to make up my mind about. Main choices are 1) staying at Stanford, 2) going to Las Vegas for WSOP or 3) flying to Hawaii for a week – so I am open to suggestions!
Chatwin’s unbearably light touch
Now already more than ten years ago, when traveling in South-East Asia I noticed Unbearable Lightness of Being in the book-exchange shelf of a Bangkok hotel and traded it immediately for Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game that I had just finished (and been rather unimpressed with). I had long intended to read Kundera’s famous novel and got started with it with a great enthusiasm.
For some reason the book never worked for me. I found it irritating, pretentious and even banal, and was constantly cringing whenever another lengthy description of terrible conditions of living in a totalitarian state came up on its pages – not to mention that in retrospect I also think that Kundera misunderstood Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Return, but that’s a whole different story. This is not to say that it’s a bad book the way Da Vinci Code is thoroughly and irredeemably bad, I just didn’t like it – quite the way I don’t like Coelho. I must say that this confession (i.e. not liking Unbearable Lightness of Being) has caused many raised eyebrows over the years – to the point that I have tended to start avoiding the topic altogether. For some reason, disliking this particular book seems to be something that has to be defended as one is almost expected to feel guilty for this, or at least have a pretty darn good explanation.
Anyway, I remembered all this because I just finished a book by Bruce Chatwin – Utz – that I enjoyed immensely. Chatwin wrote Utz in 1988, six years after Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness and just a year before his own untimely death, and just like Unbearable Lightness the novel takes place (mostly) in Prague. It is a story about Kaspar Joachim Utz, a man who keeps a fabulous collection of Meissen porcelain in his tiny two-room flat in central Prague. Although free to leave Czechoslovakia, Utz is unable to do so – being a prisoner of his own priceless collection that he can’t take with him.
A central theme in Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness – indeed, the point that the very title of the book refers to – is that as we only live once, our existence is “light”, leaving no trace in its uniqueness. Or, as Tomáš muses at the end of third chapter: “what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all”. But where the characters of Kundera’s novel collapse under the unbearable lightness of their own unique and ultimately meaningless existence, Kaspar Utz refuses to be weighed down by his inescapable predicament:
…the true heroes of this impossible situation were people who wouldn’t raise a murmur against the Party or State – yet who seemed to carry the sum of Western Civilisation in their heads. With their silence they inflict a final insult on the State, by pretending it does not exist.
Porcelain, a pure aesthetic substance which is at the same time fragile and eternal, is for Utz an “antidote of decay”. And so Utz would rather be stuck in Prague with his collection than loose in the free world without it. In the words of Tyler Durden from Fight Club “it’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”. And ultimately it is giving up our unlimited freedom to “do anything” that enables us to become the persons we want to be – as for a human being this is never possible to accomplish alone on our own.
Chatwin’s Utz is a short and deceptively simple book – similar in that sense to Baricco’s Silk. Reading it carefully, however, rewards with many layers of meaning and reference. Ultimately, like Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness, Utz is a book about our freedom and what we choose to do with it – but Chatwin manages this with a touch a lot lighter than Kundera.
What are they for?
Stanley Fish makes rather an unapologetic point in his article from January 2008 that I came across accidentally, titled Will the Humanities Save Us, stating that humanities are not supposed to be viewed as means rather than an ultimate end in their own right – l’art pour l’art. This is obviously a problematic point of view as soon as one considers humanities to include disciplines such as history or anthropology (not to mention economy), where most of their respective practitioners would probably not agree that their fields of study are to be viewed purely as a source of enjoyment with any possible practical application being of only secondary importance at best. However, I suppose that regarding literary theory and philosophy it is a valid point of view – and something that I have in fact heard being voiced in the past. But once reduced to this, an inconvenient question begs to be asked – if humanities is indeed all about the personal enjoyment then why should anyone else care? Why should others, who find enjoyment in things completely different – be it physics, football or ice cream – foot the bill of those departments in universities and scholars traveling to conferences on Heiddeger or Henry James?
It certainly is a corageous coming out of closet, and something that anyone of a lesser stature than Stanley Fish couldn’t even try, but ultimately I am not sure if it’s doing humanities any service to proudly claim that if the world finds them somewhat irrelevant then the fault is world’s.
Fresh and frisky
Already for several years has there been a popular proliferation of books that brandish a designation of “Social History” on the bottom of their back cover. This is one of the obvious if somewhat delayed results of “history going total” in the vein of Marc Bloch’s famous book Apologie pour l’histoire, which marked a break with former view of history as something that deals only with important things. As Bloch, and in his wake a whole new generation of historians argued, everything has history and thus history is total.
Nowadays, one can find a book about the history of pretty much anything. One of the freshest – pardon the pun – books that draw upon this trend is FRESH: A perishable history by Susanne Freidberg, published by Harvard University Press last month and reviewed in TLS of April 17. There have been several pop-historical publications on food and eating recently, such as Salt: A World History by Kurlansky, Spice: The History of a Temptation by Turner, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World by Zuckerman, The True History of Chocolate by Coe, Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Abott, along with some older books that have acquired a status of something classic such as Mintz’s Sweetness and Power or Goody’s Food and Love - and I could go on and on. Fresh, while in one way firmly in the same tradition, is at the same time somewhat different. It takes a close look at our current obsession with “freshness” - an “idea that emerged to fill the conceptual ellipsis that resulted from removing the site of production from the sight of consumers”. If we all grew our carrots, farmed our cows and caught our fish, there would be no need to ask “is it fresh?” – and actually the very same line could also be extended to the craze about organic food. It is precisely because we have lost our personal relation to the food we consume, and because we have it, collectively, in such abundance as never before in history that we have became obsessed over how exactly is it produced. We want it 100% natural in our stores and supermarkets that are anything but. We want to know that our apples have been grown by human sweat alone without any fertilizers, and we want to know that chikens we eat lived happy lives and died with no pain. Not only this – we also demand “permanent global summertime”, with all the fruit and vegetables being both available and fresh all year round.
The TLS review faults Freidberg for the “lack of conviction” and not taking her stance vis-à-vis all the issues she describes – which actually didn’t bother me much at all. There are plenty of books around that do that – Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation is the first port of call for anyone looking for a political manifesto on modern American food, but there are several others. Freidberg’s book is an entertaining as well as enlightening view that plays on the old adage – you are what you eat – and as such we all may be a lot less fresh than we’d like to think.
Bring ‘em back!
As it’s Saturday I decided to have a library-free day, which in practice simply meant that I read outside rather than indoors. I have reached the Middle Ages with my research reading which is somewhat closer to the present day than what I read at Emory but still pretty far out in terms of everyday relevance – so it was refreshing to read some essays and articles from (and about) this century for a change.
One of the first things that caught my attention was this piece from National Geographic, which tells how scientists are getting close to cloning extinct species – trying to construct a mammoth out of an elephant DNA and such. This all evokes a lot of Jurassic Park themes, but the idea what struck me was that once something like this is possible why would anyone feel limited to simply recreating extinct species? Why not start from scratch? This way we could end up in places a lot more interesting and, in many ways scarier, than Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. In addition to a short-lived Tamagochi craze, there have been computer games around for years that allow players to breed their own pets, at the level of rather simple crossing of virtual cats in Petz to tinkering with the DNA of “norns” in the cult game Creatures and seeing what comes out of it. Think of a lego set for grown men in white coats with the medieval bestiary was an inspirational manual. Or indeed, as the NG article also concludes – where do you draw the line, given that the difference between human and chimpanzee DNA is less than 1%? If you approach the DNA piecemeal, what can you use and what exactly remains off limits, as something surely has to unless we will want to end up with people bringing back their extinct grandmothers.
New Bookforum is out and there’s an article on Africa’s new literary boom – a topic that has interested me for a while. There seems to be a great deal of worthwile reading coming out of the continent in the wake of what would count as already “established authors” such as Achebe, Soyinka, Okri and Gordimer. This reminds me that today I also finished reading a book called Bazaar of the Idiots by Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal which was great fun along the lines of his famous fellow Columbian writer – and goes to further prove the point that it actually pays to dig a bit deeper than the front line of acclaimed writers of any given country or period. I will probably did write about it some lines in Varrak’s book blog.
Then, in terms of at least somewhat local news, it turns out that May is a National Masturbation Month in the United States – a tradition (a month, not masturbation) that apparently began in 1995 in San Fransisco. America doesn’t seem to cease amazing me.
Sideways
Helelyn left back for Europe last night and so I am alone once again. On Saturday we rented a card and had a fun day in scorching heat in Sonoma and Napa valleys. As I am in general not a big fan of Californian wines it was mostly a scenic drive with the final tally of alcohol consumed working out precisely two glasses of white wine. We did visit a number of vineyards, each of which had a separate building with a big “TASTING” sign on front and usually filled to the point of bursting by jovial white middle-aged men in shorts and their tipsy wives, swallowing rather than spitting their samples while listening attentively to red-nosed proprietor’s explanations on how to find this little hint of apple in the aftertaste of chardonnay or fully appreciate the velvety smoothness of the house reserve cabernet sauvignon.
Yesterday I moved to Palo Alto myself, closer to Stanford where I expect to spend the next two weeks. The town itself is very nice, reminiscent of downtown Berkeley with plenty of small eateries and cafes along tree-lined streets. I worked out the practicalities of gym/library/wifi access today and will get busy tomorrow after I’ve had my second meeting at noon. Walking around at Stanford’s faux medieval style campus this morning it occurred to me how similar the US universities are to medieval monasteries – which in itself is not such a surprising observation given that the genealogical roots of our institutions of higher education are precisely there. Like in monasteries in the medieval Europe, the US university campuses are self-contained centers of learning, homes to libraries and filled with people who view the outside world with certain disdain and compassion. All that being said, it can be a very pleasant and enjoyable environment.
I checked out the bookstore here which, while not nearly as impressive as the one at Harvard, is still pretty decent. I decided to leaf through recently published Susan Sontag’s diaries and was struck how different they are from the stuff that got published under her name during her lifetime. In that regard I’ve found it interesting to compare two big female American essayists of the 20th century – Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. Sontag’s essays are very much NY-like: passionate but impersonal, hard-nosed and often cynical. Didion, born and having lived most of her life in California, in many ways shares Sontag’s intellect as well as an apparent sombre outlook and elegiac concern for the world, but writes very differently. Most of her essays are narrated in first person and involve a lot of personal details, feelings and memories. So in that sense it was very revelatory to also see the personal side of Sontag. Her diaries have this feeling of immediacy and privacy that is not present in her essays but can be found everywhere in Didion’s writings.
But tomorrow I will start another spell at the library – now that my eyes have recovered I’m already looking forward to it.
Saving the world is a tough job
When having our morning fix at the Starbucks across the street from our hotel, we happened to sit at the same table with two elderly ladies deep in discussion. It turned out that one of them (diligently taking notes) was soon to be famous savior of the world and the other was her friend hell-bent on getting her there. The former was supposed to give a speech somewhere and they were trying to pack as much punch into it as humanly possible. From what we heard, the past life of the lady savior consisted of three main themes: 1) saving the rain forest – very important as if “the rain forest goes, everything else goes”, 2) protecting the children and 3) bringing democracy to the Third World. On top of that she had apparently done something to save baby tigers – what precisely that was we didn’t find out. They were discussing in great deal issues of positioning – i.e. how our lady celebrity compares with the likes of Dian Fossey and George Soros, who – as we learned – all have very narrow focuses; as well as thinking ahead on how to best handle selling the rights to her biography.
It was unreal, like something out of Baudrillard 
Californication
Today when I was sitting on a bench in Stanford campus, a girl with some seriously messy hair and a look on her face as if he had just been abducted by aliens walks up to me, apologizes profusedly and then asks “Could you please tell me what day of the week is it?” I was somewhat taken aback by the question as, to be perfectly honest, keeping track of weekdays is currently not my strongest suit. Anyway, after some quick counting and basic calculus I was able to state with some conviction that it must be Thursday. To which the girl responded “Wow… that explains a lot”, thanked me and walked her way.
This encounter goes some way describing the feeling of California – especially when compared to the upper East Coast cities. People are seriously laid back and taking it very easy, and I haven’t even got to the LA yet. I did manage to catch some cold here within the first two days though – on the first day we were wondering why on earth are people wearing scarves, jackets and sweaters in such a nice sunny day, but I suppose that now we know. The sun may be warm but the constant ocean breeze is surprisingly chilly and that must have got me.
I did have first of my meetings at Stanford today (went very well) with one more coming next week. As Stanford seems such a nice place and their library has a rather relaxed policy regarding visitors it sounds very enticing to try and find myself a place to stay in Palo Alto and spend another week here before heading to UCLA.
We have another two days before Helelyn will fly back, so tomorrow we might rent a car – which is dirt cheap here – and take a tour of the wine country just north of San Francisco.
