Mushin-Sho

One of my favorite things about Aarthi is that she is completely secure talking about other women’s beauty, allowing me to talk about other men’s beauty without hindrance. During a recent conversation she asked me to check out some clothes online and I was floored by this model. I have no explanation except to say that I think the mission statement has been revised, although I remain uncompromising about intelligence level.

 

As I told Aarthi, this woman has a fierce elegance about her that is mesmerizing.  

 

 

My body is responding well to the balmy (over 30 degrees Fahrenheit) clime, manifesting most beautifully in a sense of sublimity.

Emerson defines the sublime thus: “I am glad to the brink of fear,” a sentiment I find beautiful, eloquent and approaching the height of its own subject.

Meanwhile, I, with two major papers, tons of reading and a library that seems to have excised from its collections every journal or specific volume I need, am approaching sublimity inversely; I am afraid to the brink of gladness.

Also, an absolutely brilliant image from my brother: Click on it for a much larger size (highly recommended).

 

Elephantine Abstract

 

I complained to many empathetic others about the horrid thing called social networking. Actually, it is neither the practice nor the potentially wonderful people one can meet but rather the insincerity that is all too often evoked during such events. To be clear, more than another’s insincerity, I hate when I myself give into the pressure of “making a contact.”

There were several social events, featuring new professors, famous scholars and many brilliant colleagues, which I had a chance to attend. The first night was a lot of fun because I had enough energy to be charming, engaged and engaging. The second night, however, I felt exhausted and unable to say anything worthwhile, a direct consequence of the previous night’s festivities. Here, I must qualify this account as a scene seen through a tired, if melancholic, lens. I did have a great deal of wonderful conversation with people, however, those few cases where conversation is labored, seemingly unwelcome, haunt the majority of my memory. That is, the whole event, both this particular instance and events such as these generally, foregrounds a very strong personal neurosis that insists upon everyone’s respect. Although writing this helps to free its grip. I have to add that it is these particular instances when I feel another’s dislike or disinterest, imagined or not, that seem to call forth that wholly annoying trait, insincerity.

“You only need a few committee members and a few colleagues; you don’t need to like everyone and everyone doesn’t need to like you,” said Brent Edwards, during our brief conversation on the subject of transferring and choosing programs.

This aphoristic advice came in a conversation that initially felt belabored, but tuned when I decided to offer the only sincere comment I could regarding his awesome talk. Against my initial hesitation, I openly admitted to him that although I had no investment in his scholarship per se, I found his delivery and presence to be inspiringly elegant. There is a gorgeous grace about the man that I openly admired. Brent replied with flattered thanks and was quick to turn the spotlight on my own career, offering the noted advice midway through our conversation.

At the evening’s close, and to my great surprise, he gave me his email address saying that he would be happy to talk more about other institutions and offer any insight his particular perspective may have. I first replied that I appreciated his generosity and would certainly take him up on his offer, adding the only words that came readily to mind:

“Elegance, unfaltering elegance.”

 

I will share only a couple of highlights from what has been a long and curvy day.

First:         I didn’t necessarily like the way my syllabus played out the last month of the semester. So, as I have often done with my class, I subject them to the same pressures that I face. That is, I had them collectively create a month long syllabus.
    Our deliberations first turned to the particular subject matter. Although some were excited to explore my “Comedy as theory” syllabus, we decided to focus our attention on international issues. Ruminating on the limited and too worn path of critiquing U.S. foreign policy, we chose instead to focus on Africa, a continent whose many particularities have been totalized in America’s blind gaze.
    We’ve decided to use three films only the first of which we will spend class time watching: Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardner, and Lord of War. Augmenting the filmic texts will be one article on the (mis)use of Jihad in the ‘Muslim world;’ my hope and current aim is to extrapolate from this particular piece the various ways war can be legitimated.
    I was really pleased with the class’ construction of the syllabus, although, I made sure to note that there was no hundred percent consensus. I pointed this out to them to foreground both the broader proverb that one cannot please everyone (although I try damn hard), and particularly note that despite all the enthusiasm for any particular syllabus there will always be those who simply don’t care. Additionally, in foregrounding these traits as well as reminding them that I am all too aware that they see the class as a hoop to jump through, I hope to actually generate more interest by putting the onus on them to make it interesting, challenging and satisfying. We shall see.

Second:     A geeky digital moment that launched me into the abstractosphere.
    I was at the library copying various research articles when my OneCard ran out of money. So, I whipped out my laptop, connected to the library’s wireless network, accessed my OneCard account online, put money in through my credit card, and was back copying within two minutes. Whoa…
    I don’t have the gift of prose to properly convey the strangeness of the moment, which in critical memory, is heightened by the fact that “copying” itself is an amazing phenomena. Oh, Benjamin where art thou?
    Adding to the weirdness, I hope to get a handheld digital scanner soon so that I will not need to photocopy pages but instead make them available digitally, with the added perk of making articles subject to the computer’s internal search engine.

Now, if you will excuse me, my pocket protector is leaking. (Can they leak?) Whatever. Insert clever closing line here.

First thoughts:

            The only means through which he could break the totality of War to which he was given over, Zenocrate, dies.

            He immediately plunges deeply into War. He still loves his generals and his children, but although they are particular in the sense that they are not just structural, they are fully grounded in the larger totalizing sweep of Warfare. Insofar as they are all aligned and subsumed within the same totality they are held together as a community, which is, again, particular to the extent that it is not structural.

            Hubris:            This classical dramatic element is a viable way of thinking about Tamburlaine’s death but it can be better understood in terms of Totality and specifically Christian gestures.

            First, Tamburlaine is hubristic in the same way that Icarus is, in that he dares to approach the Divine. Interestingly, as he calls on ‘Mahomet’ to send down a miracle to undo or prevent the book burning, thus even challenging his existence, he is stricken with some disease, thus affirming the presence and validity of ‘Mahomet’. Of course, this is all done in a Christian way, because it sees Muhammad as a Christ figure for the Islamic world, which he is not. However, burning books is an interesting way of challenging divinity because Islam understands Quran to be the unmediated word of God.

            But Tamburlaine’s pride is not excessive as it is in more traditional hubristic figures. He is not prideful of his skill at war, but is rather totally subsumed in the Totality of War until he deifies himself as War incarnate. That is, it is not pride but total submission that animates Tamburlaine. Here again, we find Christian gestures, especially in the notion that Tamburlaine can be the ‘incarnation’ of a Totality, of War. The best evidence, aside from his own verbosity challenging and comparing ‘the heavens’, is found in the final moments of his life when he proclaims Amyras to be his successor.

            “My flesh, divided in your precious shapes, / Shall still retain my spirit, though I die.”

            This is a deeply Christian gesture that not only says that Totality/ the Other can be incarnate in a particular, but that the incarnation, the spirit with its attendant strengths, can be transmitted to progeny (broadly understood).

 

A few things to report and a question to ask from the day’s work:

Does anyone else feel the need to take naps during the day?
    I am not one to do this normally but today my work was broken by no less than three separate naps. Weird, and entirely irrelevant, thanks for reading though.

Tamburlaine:         I have spent the majority of the day reading through Marlowe’s famed Tamburlaine plays reading them through the lens of our course’s larger narrative. Interestingly, I think I found a way to read at least the first play; only the sketches of my reading will be offered here.

Invoking the larger philosophical discussions of Self and Other that have framed the course, I found myself shying away from a colonial reading and rather investigating the work’s theory, specifically, the dynamics between particularity and totality. (I use these terms as synonyms for Self and Other, rather than invoking Heidegger’s sense of Totality, which I am as yet unversed in)  For Tamburlaine, it seems to me, the totality into which he is swept is not religious but rather military; he is obsessed, and subsumed in that obsession, with War and Conquest. This drive in turn motivates much of the action of the play, but is juxtaposed, both dramatically and philosophically, to his love of particulars.

Here I must invoke Zizek’s notion of love as a violent act, insofar as that love is only held for one or a few particular creatures, precisely because it exempts the possibility of a Universal love. Tamburlaine manifests this kind of violent love, refusing to trade any general or soldier for any amount of gold, especially in his relationship with Zenocrate. However, these loves, although particular to certain people and not just a structural event, are tied intricately into the larger totality of War. The generals are obvious in this regard, helping him and subsuming themselves in the same totality. Here is the first point then; although these relationships are loving, in Zizek’s violent sense of it, they are also woven into the larger totalizing project of War/ Conquest.

The second point is the play’s interesting turn of the Self/ Other dynamic, wherein totality is actually subsumed, or better yet, cut away by the very particularities it provided the ground for. This shift is evident during Tamburlaine’s sack of Egypt, the birthplace of Zenocrate and the home of her father, whom she still loves. Zenocrate’s love for her father makes her deeply sorrowful because she must witness his destruction. Tamburlaine’s love for Zenocrate prevents him from seeing Conquest fully realized, capturing the Egyptian king (the father) but returning him to his throne given that he will be loyal to Tamburlaine. The play ends there with Tamburlaine calling for his generals to take up the thrones of their respective kingdoms and end their conquests.

War/ Conquest as totality subsumes Tamburlaine driving him to actions that he sometimes loathes to do; however, insofar as they are necessary for the larger project of War, they are carried out ruthlessly. Paradoxically, it is this totalizing drive that ground the love he has for particular people, whom he will not barter for anyone or anything else. However, when one of these particulars, Zenocrate, cuts herself from the totality, powered by her own particular love for her father, Tamburlaine also cuts himself from War because it disturbs the very love it helped birth.

Interesting dynamics, I think. Let’s hope Prof thinks so also.

I have just finished grading student papers. To celebrate, I have commissioned from myself the following poem:

(Standing ovation)

Thank you all, however, I would be disingenuous if I were not to credit my muse, No Fear Shakespeare.

Any of ye-old-hags catch the movie reference in the title? You know you did…

A conversation I overheard while meditating and trying to rekindle the possibility of human goodness:

“I love you equally”
“Aw, thanks…”
“And, I love you man”
“You too man. You’re not driving are you?”
“It’s cool, I’m a lawyer!”
“Word. Alright, be safe”

This drunken conversation has been sponsored by Fosters; Australian for ‘stay off the road asshole.’

Note two: Groovesalad, a wonderful internet radio station, had the dubious pleasure of playing a track from an artist named “Lie-in King.” I hereby forsake my pseudonym Phaedrus and declare myself Didactatron.

Warning to all people considering grad school: this is how your brain will work after grading student papers all day.

Pretty image:

The more I read of Semenza’s book, the more I like his entire approach to the academic career. Systematizing work, laying out all those mystified processes and stages is obviously his goal in this work, however, the insights he gives into his own thinking also help a great deal. Specifically, Semenza recounts, although without nearly the emphasis I am currently placing on it, a particular turning point in his graduate studies.

After learning that the average Assistant professor has a 65 hour work week, he describes encountering two particular reactions, one of which was his own. The first, less successful, reaction saw the tenure track assistant professorship as a state of responsibility, knowledge and skill that cannot yet be grasped by the graduate student, which in turn, alleviates her of that work schedule. The other reaction, one I share with Semenza, is to say that I must work at least as hard, if not harder, precisely because I don’t have that skill and knowledge yet.

“Think like your professors not your students.”

I highlight this moment because it has been so beneficial in understanding both the orientation a graduate student should have and a real quantifiable measurement of ‘working hard.’ Obviously, putting in 65 hours a week does not mean one is necessarily more productive than one who works a paltry 50 hours; however, it does offer a crude measure of life-time one is expected to give.

I have a clear sense of ‘being productive’, or rather, I have a clear sense of when I have been productive. Unfortunately, productivity feels much like a muscle that, left unused and atrophied, will yield that wonderfully satisfying soreness once used even minimally. When I persist in exercising that muscle (be it productivity, concentration, writing), the greater the threshold before fatigue. Measuring productivity in terms of time, although ineffectual in measuring quality, does have the advantage of demonstrating the professionalism and dedication we need.


P.S:  Have fun with it…you know you don’t see yourself doing anything else, so make this as enjoyable as you can; in fact, make that one point by which you measure productivity

(p.s = para Shashi: I am talking to myself: Pay no attention to the didactic all knowing, all simplifying voice, because she’s talking to me…)

I have spent so much time reading today that all the words have acquired a blurry glow making them indecipherable, even more so if I try to focus. Hmm…could this be a metaphor for graduate life, close reading practices, Derridian deconstruction, or perhaps just a bodily clue telling me it’s time to end the work day?

…I also had a dream that I was a white dragon that turned into a cherry blossom tree…very Kurosawa…

 
Regardless, I have two things to offer for the day. 1)An image from NyTimes arts section that I will call,  Mission statement…

…and second is my proposal for the “Tutor Institute,” a local event attended by a few surrounding universities…should be fun:

Our efforts to be great tutors and teachers are often directed outwards, directing students toward goals that are often not their own. Training and experience help us realize that we must empathize with a given student’s particular level and expectations, pushing them, but not projecting on to them. Unfortunately, little is said about how we are to achieve this kind of empathy.

This brief presentation shifts the focus from student to tutor asking how we can take control of the thoughts, desires and goals we have for our students and maintain the clarity necessary for successful sessions. More specifically, we will explore the connection between breathing, thoughts and empathy through direct practice with techniques.

I’ve just received my summer class schedule and am preoccupied with creating the “Comedy as Theory” syllabus even while working on my seminar projects. I chose to take on a two-course load over the summer for two reasons stemming out of Semenza’s Graduate Studies for the 21st Century. The first is to prepare myself for the same responsibility in the Fall term, which of course will be joined by my seminar coursework. The second, and more interesting reason, is to emulate/ simulate the conditions of future professorships.

Semenza’s book is enormously helpful in contextualizing the graduate career both in the microcosmic day-to-day realities and political pitfalls one faces and in the broader academic career that these moments prelude. In the R1 professorship that we aim for, the normal/ ideal teaching load is 2/2 (two courses per semester) that is meant to be a generous invitation to conduct serious ongoing research, despite the fact that teaching two courses is at least 40 hours of work per week. Regardless, my own summer ambitions include finishing my Master’s thesis and perhaps doing campus visits to potential transfer locations. The research for the paper, however, has to be done in conjunction with the teaching load, just like a real tenure track professor. Woo hoo…all grown up…

More interestingly, although this post tastes like vanilla to me, is conceptualizing the syllabi for the summer. I’m interested in continuing the current engagement with a wide course of issues, particularly as they effect urban settings like Detroit, but am thinking of framing the course in terms of resistance rather than exploration/ description. Although my current class’ readings are chosen and arranged to present a range of arguments and perspectives, having students extrapolate from them specific points, their own stances on those points and demonstrate these arguments through artifacts might have been asking too much. Our class discussions and their own artifacts have been great but I don’t think that I gave them enough to ground resistance/ re-cognizance on. This is where comedy/ comedians would be helpful.

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There are a few threads I want to pursue because no single one can hold my floating attention at the moment.

Teaching: My class recently completed their large group papers yesterday, climaxing in a class ‘Museum Day,’ during which they set up their artifact projects and explored other group installations. I was very pleased with the way their projects were set up, using all four laptop screens given to them and interfacing digital and physical materials in interesting ways. Some wanted to play music as a soundtrack to their installation, but since these setups were to be directly reflective of what they described/ used in their papers, new items couldn’t be added. I’ve been disappointed in the lack of music and video clips in student projects but am both sympathetic to the initial strangeness to this kind of work and hopeful that the artifacts will be more dynamic in the last phase of class.

Although I have been aware of this particular neuroses, I was surprised to find myself foreground it to my students; I refuse to let them think that my class is ‘easy.’ They all attested to the difficulty of the project and papers thus far with a majority voting for “interesting hard” not “annoying hard:” my own terms. Obviously, the course will refine itself but students are freely delivering interesting feedback, which I’m happy to add, is one of the great advantages of being a young instructor with a casual classroom.

Home: My parents just returned from a trip to India, the highlight of which was their video of my home village, Sankapelli. This tiny, poor, rural space sustained so many summer vacations in my childhood and even the greatest birthday party I ever had. I was carried from our house to the beach atop my then bodybuilding cousin, and cut a specially made cake in the shape of a car surrounded by closest family, extended members and neighbors. For my brother and I, there is no place on the planet feels more like home, tragically and beautifully so.

Writing: I’ve decided to reinitiate my daily post writing for the duration of the break. There will be so many books, articles, and primary materials absorbed which, without a regular mode of exploration and expunging, will lead to intellectual indigestion and a lot of hot air.

Other thoughts have been stopped by Don Cherry and Wings hockey…

Catching up on Daily Shows again; if any more references are made to Ganesha, whom 60 minutes affectionately called ‘the elephant god,’ Hinduism as polytheistic or the many arms and legs these deities are often depicted with, I swear to the many gods that I will beat someone with two hands, stab them with a third all while kicking them with a fourth leg.

Hinduism is not polytheistic you f—in mooks…get your sh—straight…especially 60 Minutes…

Everyone be proud of me!

I broke my hermetic trend and joined some colleagues for spirits and the funniest conversations/ revelations that I’ve ever heard.

The following images have been chosen to disclose nothing of my colleagues but only to implicate and aggrandize me.
–DoubleTurtle—

How the world saw me

how I saw the world

A photographer I’m not, but I really liked the way these image came out. My thanks to those who have offered encouragement.

p.s. My name means Moon

Macabees moon

Main moon

For the nth time in my life a cute girl taught me something about myself. The particular woman has to remain anonymous simply because I didn’t get a chance to know her name; the circumstances of this particular absence contain the lesson.

I study in the UGL so that I can retain some sense of social inclusion even as I isolate myself in sound and texts, head phones and essays. However, a secret hope manifested and a very attractive girl sat a few tables down from me, facing me, and willingly playing eye-contact games. Another woman joined her, an old work partner of mine, and for several minutes afterwards their conversation seemed to be directed my way. I took off my headphones and listened in to get a better sense of their conversation, which as far as I could tell, was trying to theorize why I wouldn’t approach their table. I refused to believe this, dismissing it as my vanity getting the best of me, of me deeply misunderstanding a conversation among friends. One clear moment of eye contact, a smile and “at least he’s comfortable enough to do that, I like that,” later, I realize I wasn’t delusional/ megalomaniacal but a violent wuss.

The wuss part is obvious but why violent?

The woman didn’t have a chance after I overheard some of their conversation, probably even before. Within a few words, I summarily dismissed her as a distraction, a potential fling but otherwise unimportant, one who had nothing to offer me etc. A few minutes after she left I was deeply disturbed by my self-reflections, realizing that this was not an isolated moment but a real issue to deal with.

Paradoxically, my scholarship is dedicated to recognizing these kinds of violent gestures implicit in so many texts, in the records of encounter, but it is precisely the same scholarship that allows me to perform the violent readings of people. Sensitivity to language makes anyone’s speech, writing, or other discourse subject to an infinite ‘deconstruction’ erasing any trace of humanity, leaving only the shell of a perpetrator.

The violence is horrific but only one manifestation of what I often call ‘hyperintellectuality,’ a really troubling mode in which it is impossible to turn off the academic filters.

Thank you anonymous cute girl.

...to borrow from the last chapter title of Edward Said’s “flawed classic” (Terry Eagleton’s words) Orientalism is, for me, an ongoing project that tragically has too much primary material to draw from.

If you want to kill a few minutes, look at this piece from CBS news show 60 Minutes; is it silly to expect more from educated people?

Perhaps Orpah should add Said to her book club; what the hell is this?

I don’t know if I want to shoot myself or everyone else….

Something to take the edge off…

“It is through understanding himself as the future to a patriarchal past that the Christian reader defines his own present as, precisely, a now of reading.”

Although self-confidence in my own intellect is lacking at the moment, I want to try and extrapolate from the sentence specifically and the course’s narrative generally. The Self/ Other relationship has been foundational to my intellectual trajectory but limited to understanding those terms as they are deployed in specific postcolonial frames. Dr. Jackson has opened (a favorite word) the relevance of the Self/ Other relationship, expanding my understanding of these terms as signifiers of foundational philosophical problems. However, I want to return, and extrapolate, from the pre-modern moment the class focuses on.

As soon as I read the quoted sentence I wondered if the specifically ‘Christian’ philosophic gesture, typology, is helpful in understanding our late-capitalist, globalized moment. Specifically, if a reader understands him/herself “as the future of a patriarchal past,” then this is a trope that is still with us today. Let me be more abstract before grounding myself in the present moment. It seems to me that the idea of understanding oneself as the given future of a recognizable past can be philosophically restated to say that the Self understands itself through an Other that is actually figured as a past-Self. Differently put, Self and Other could actually be the one entity differentiated by a perceived teleological temporality.

Grounding the idea:

First world, Western, modernized nation-states (or whatever other essentializing signifier we care to attach) are seen as the inevitable conclusion, or at least relative future, inherent in ‘forward moving’ historical time. Third world, yet developing nations are, in contrast, positioned as a passed historical moment that is merely the figural antecedent to the Western now. The ‘developed’ understand themselves as such by contrast to the ‘undeveloped’ who are not wholly Other but only a past-Self, a historical antecedent, a prefiguration that points to the fully realized Western now. This gesture, or rather this extrapolation of typology as a ‘Christian’ philosophical move, would help explain both the general philosophic origins of colonization and the oft used temporal metaphors used to describe the perceived ‘radical break’ between the two worlds.

Thoughts?

I’ve spent the whole day, save a few lunch hours, in the UGL enjoying Woolf, Luther and student papers without ambient noise thanks to my new uber-headphones. The sacrifice, if you will pardon the Abrahamic pun, is a slight devaluation of personal aesthetics; they look kind of like hearing aids. Playing right now is an assortment of house musique whose energetic bass lines are a vitalizing drug, especially when blasted through uber-headphones. Did I mention that I got new headphones?

Library observations: I tried to establish a strong pace to my weekend yesterday by promising to lock myself in the library until it closes; unfortunately, that was only 9pm. I was surprised and disappointed. Do they expect that all of us actually have lives? Is this some kind of institutionalized ‘life-ism’ that attempts to pour more money into surrounding clubs and restaurants by denying us the one environment that neutralizes the urge to binge drink? Actually, I can hear students arguing, the library causes binge drinking. Eh…same difference.

On Saturday night, however, they are open until 11pm. I find this strange because Saturday is ‘date night’ and unless you’re one of those gifted beings with ‘dates’ on speed dial (aka booty calls), home is the only destination after 11. Yes, clubs and bars only get started then but if you’re in my position, i.e. reading or writing a blog post in a library on a Saturday night, you ain’t goin nowhere.

Somehow a sad hope lingers, perhaps from the night’s energy or my imagination of possible events happening even as I write that I’ll get picked up by some charming woman here.



“May I join you,” she would ask as she brought me another coffee.
“Certainly,” I will reply as I suavely pull out one of the hideously upholstered chairs.

Attention library patrons; we will be closing within a half hour; please bring any books you would like to check out to the front desk.



It’s only 9pm!

“Life-ist motherf———s,” I grumble while walking to the front desk with Sex for Dummies.

A recent all-nighter, the first in over a year, has left me discombobulated, a strange psychic state which only allows me to find respite in hip-hop. On the pod at the moment, and all-day, Anti-Pop Consortium and Dj Vadim, The Isolationist; the mix of fantastic beats and brilliant, if difficult, lyrics is exquisite. The album struck many chords, pun intended, but most interesting were Vadim’s samples.

There are many ‘types’ of records from which samples are drawn, jazz, funk, older hip hop to name a few, but favored and particularly resonant are ‘instructional’ records. I would imagine that these recordings are the precursors to audio-books and videos that aim to teach mental or physical techniques, by necessity, through non-textual mediums. Lessons on breathing, something of especial interest to me, are interspersed with ‘positive thinking’ voice samples that, although simple and didactic, still proved to be inspiring if only in the slightest. Demonstrating a clear influence from Wu-Tang, Vadim also samples martial arts movies (voices) heavily to complement both hip-hop tropes (unbeatable mc, warfare, ‘techniques’ etc) and the intelligent, wonderfully peaceful verses from M-Sayeed and Beans.

Unfortunately, the same martial arts samples make me nostalgic for a lost space, a temporal moment where trust, openness, vulnerability and a physical location that seemed a vortex of all that was good and hopeful in human experience. The currents of hyper-intellectuality can quickly efface the possibility of a ‘true’ moment, a ‘real’ experience, subsuming the possibility of either under the weight of a simulacral, alienating, late capitalist moment. However, and this is my nostalgia in tension with my intellect, there was something deeply resonant, ‘True,’ in the movements, postures, techniques, in the deployment of physical force without anger or competitiveness, in that Present.

Despite the pain that always accompanies nostalgic moments, I write all this with a fond smile, the hope of a maturing practice and a realization that it is entirely possible, natural, for me to immerse/ emerge.

Whoppi Goldberg jokes that Bush sleeps with Condy Rice, pointing to the latter’s toothy satiated smile when deboarding Air Force One….

Just look at his face…hilarious..

Jim Young/Reuters

From a NYtimes article: U.S. and India Reach Agreement on Nuclear Cooperation

Indians protested against President Bush today in Bombay.

Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press

Although I appreciate the powerful statement such mass gathering makes, there is something in this particular image that is quite disturbing to me; the complete effacement of individual presence in favor of a homogenous, reified, group identity. One can barely, if at all, decipher any humanity in this image; it might as well be a field of dandelions. They’re all the same anyway.

Admittedly, this may just be hypersensitive intellectualism coming through, a plausible claim to which I would offer the following as counter evidence.

Mr. Burns, the administration’s point man in the nuclear talks, added: “It has developed its entire nuclear program over 30 years alone because it had been isolated. So the question we faced was the following: Is it better to maintain India in isolation, or is it better to try to bring it into the international mainstream? And President Bush felt the latter.”

Isolation? Thank you dear President for bringing these bassackwards people inline with the rest of modernity.

And where the hell does this come form?

In one section of the field, a crowd gathered to burn an American flag. The crowd began beating the flaming flag. Then a young man lifted a boy named Shoaib over the fire and instructed him to urinate on it. He did, bemused by all the attention on him. He said he was in third grade.

Anit-Americanism as infantile attention seeking? The article brilliantly ends on this note that privileges America as an emigrant destination while retaining the potential ‘terrorism’ any non-western nuclear power is suspiciously capable of.

“Suppose Bush is here, said Sajid Khan, 25, a student. I will suicide bomb to Bush. If we could get a visa, we would go there and fight.”

A superlarge image but well worth the download moment; here is the original site.

At the conclusion of this long day I come to the successful completion of my February initiative, one blog post per day for the month.

To use my roommate’s favorite metaphor, my writing and my perception of it has gone in waves. End wave metaphor. Opening with eagerness, a willingness to take risks and write simply for the opportunity to exercise that muscle, I felt increasingly better about my ability to deploy language, a perspective that changed abruptly as my ability to self-critique improved. More accurately, I gained a better orientation of my location within the spectrum of language skill, which is to say that I realize I ain’t shit. However, improvements have been made, at the very least in my ability to realize my own deficits.

I don’t feel an interesting post developing today so please excuse me as I look at my fingertips in critical bewilderment. Do join if you’d like.

An interesting consequence of attempting to write everyday, insofar as this brief initiative has evinced, is to detect patterns in one’s own writing. Particular sentence structures, use of punctuation (my obsession with the semicolon for one), paragraph layout, transitions and such, all become subject to a particular style. I use subject in a semi-pejorative way because style can oppress the creative flux and evolution of language in service to particular aesthetic and functional demands. Of course, developing a particular style is inevitable to any given practice; however, I do feel an aversion to the notion of an imposition formed by the self and its attendant preferences. I’m also averse to banal commentary but cannot seem to avoid that too well either. Are these the aporia of blog ontology?

Choosing anything, says Zizek, is a violent act because you are excluding all the other available possibilities; choosing one is always violent to the many. Writing style follows the same logic.

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