By Samarth:
When I’m a red light, I’m bad.
When I’m a green light, I’m good.
I’m between good and bad.
I’m an ambulance.
My nephew is very interested in knowing who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. Amazingly, however, he is already willing to acknowledge that there are people who are “between good and bad.”
Nephew: 1
Most adults: 0
Is this how Humanities scholars or their projects percieved?
I stand at the crossroads of theory and practice, between a universalizable conception and its particular instantiations, between utopian hopes and tragic visions. Yes, and I arrived at this singular (albeit repeating) moment through…
…a haircut…
Ever since moving down (south) to Detroit proper a few years ago, I’ve been going to the same barber (hair stylist). I never quite know what she will do to my hair, despite the repetition of the same requests, which adds unneeded excitement to an already unstable life. Off-center, uneven, too much thinning out–––I have very thick hair–––water down my back when washing and the most irritating thing, which happened again today: dull tools. Come on! Get the scissors sharpened, oil the clippers before customers come so that you won’t accidentally spray them into solidarity with sea lions after a tanker spill–––and give them alliterative fodder for their blogs. The clippers bit today; actually, they gnawed on my neck until even she saw the need for an alcohol wipe and aloe vera.
I’m done. Fuck it. I tried, I lived with the discomfort of excessive force and recurring nightmares for haircuts, but damn it, I’m done.
Here, however, an ethical angel lands on my shoulder (just a few inches from my sensitively red neck) and reminds me of a few things. Slight discomfort and vanity, the idealistic angel says, are small prices to pay for helping a local neighborhood business stay alive. The prices shrink even further when one thinks of her (my barber’s) circumstances, knowing that she has few if any regulars whom she can rely on. I, of course, am under no delusion that I am this woman’s guardian angel–––sitting in an adjustable chair rather than on her shoulder–––nor do I want to posit (loyalty to) local endeavors as the panacea to globalization.
However, life in a post-industrial city has a significant impact on one’s politics. So, if I simply stop going to this barber, which is precisely what I am going to do, am I being disloyal? If not, how did such affective ties to a business build so that I still feel disloyal? Are such affective ties, especially when they dictate one’s purchasing, necessary for larger political projects such as revitalizing a neighborhood, a state’s economy, or the redistribution of a nation’s wealth? What are the global consequences of thinking along, and feeling within, these affective relationships?
Is being an academic conducive to generating such questions out of a bad haircut?
Bruce Robbins has an interesting insight into the ethical implications of protesting capital’s flight form a particular space, precisely the phenomena I am participating in by leaving my current barber. I paraphrase, “a job lost here is a job gained elsewhere.” True. ("and the job that was here was also a job that came from somewhere else")
So, I am literally in search of a compromise, a new barber in Detroit.
I just paid a visit to the Department of Homeland Security. Multiple forms of identification were checked, forms filled out and fingerprints recorded––both hands, all fingers. Yes, I just went to the USCIS office: United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. No, I am not a citizen and had to renew my green-card. The new card will arrive in a few months with a new picture underneath the familiar block letters “Resident Alien.” Familiar—Strange.
The building is anonymous, embedded within a strip mall a mile east of the downtown plazas. “Application Support Center” reads the simple white lettering on the door; there is no sign above the building. Rather, one can locate the door by first finding the “Armed Services Center”—a recruiting office––then walking a few feet past it. The door opens with a beep, a military sound reminiscent of the metal detectors at the airports. The various immigrants occupy an open, clinically clean space, and watch your entrance; they have little choice because their chairs face the door and a fellow alien is more compelling than the movie Robots playing without sound in a corner. I walk through a delineated aisle and greet a large Hispanic man seated in front of a sparse cheap table. I present papers and ID. I am given a form to fill and asked to return on completion. When I return, I have to present two forms of ID, my driver’s license and my 10-year-old green card––I am a chubby fourteen in that picture.
“Please come back when your number is called.”
I take a seat and try to choose between watching the movie or the door. When a cute blonde walks in, the choice is obvious. Hope for a conversation is broken, however, as she is quickly processed and practically finished by the time my number is called. I assume she simply has a simpler process to go through. Meanwhile, I overhear a conversation behind me.
A stocky, spectacled man in white shirt and tie comes out of his office and greets one of the aliens, a heavyset man with wheezy breath.
“What is your nation of birth sir?”
“Yugoslavia”
“Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore. Where are you from?”
“Kosovo”
“Well Kosovo is a…..still a province of Serbia, so your card will say Serbia—Montenegro. Remember to use Serbia—Montenegro on all official forms.”
“Ok”
With a smile, “And if Kosovo ever becomes independent, you can put Kosovo”
“Number 11”
I bring my attention to the woman calling my number, go to her and am passed off into the hands of a technician browsing the web. He, Antonio, walks me over to a station and slowly puts on latex gloves, sprays a cloth with cleaning fluid and wipes down a small glass surface. We begin with my right hand and scan four fingers together. Then my right thumb. The same for my left hand.
“Step over here please,” Antonio says quietly.
Each finger of my right hand is scanned independently. Each finger is rolled from right to left. On the screen, my print looks like a map, a purposefully flattened image of a round object. Each finger. Index. Middle. Ring.
“Relax”
“Oh, sorry”
Pinky. Thumb.
“Step over here”
The process repeats for the left hand.
“Have a seat please”
“Look over here.”
My picture is being taken but I don’t have my picture face on. Antonio shows me my picture and asks if I like it. I ask if we can redo it and he obliges. I ask if I can smile and he answers in the affirmative. I sit, I smile.
“You can smile, but without teeth showing.”
The picture is taken. I approve of this one. He rechecks all the information, rescans some of my fingers, then writes his identification number on my form. The screen says it is his ‘quality control’ number and lists his name next to it.
“You’re all set. Have a good day.”
“Thank you so much. You too.”
As I approach the exit, I notice again the tall heavyset security officer standing next to the door.
“Have a good day.”
“Thanks. Good luck with everything” she says.
A humanizing, if sentimentally written, article; a reminder of proportions
Suicide bombings often stop clocks nearby, throwing the delicate mechanisms out of balance. The minute hand freezes the moment that the bomber detonates, and cleanup crews find clocks hanging crookedly on walls hours later, with the moment of loss fixed forever on the clocks’ faces.
I wish I could annul all citizenships, all belonging to any Nation-State whatsoever. I’ve remarked previously about my reluctance to engage or self-identify as “Indian;” at least in any way that marks me as that exclusively.
After reading this amazing article by Arundathi Roy, I remember all those small, painful, relatively insignificant but ideal crushing moments I associate with India. However, learned critical tools blunted by sharp empathy have enlarged my disassociate tastes; I want to carry the world’s violence one step further to complete violence: complete disassociation.I would love to say “disengagement” but there’s no outside to misery, deceit, jingoism, or fucking lunacy. No. However, there is the space of voluntary delusion; “there’s nothing wrong with the world…I have nothing to do with all that…in fact, don’t even tell me about any of that…”
The words are trite but the theory is pure violence. Disassociate completely. Repress absolutely. Drink. Do anything that excludes the bloody Real.
It’s noon in Mumbai (Bombay for the nostalgic)
‘’It’s unacceptable to think there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective,’’ said Bush, growing animated as he spoke.
A direct cut and paste from a online chat I had with Aarthi regarding my being robbed a few hours earlier.
me: i’m walking home
Aarthi: ok ok
me: and in the alley behind my apartment…
the back way
Aarthi: parking lot way
me: a group of five black teenagers are heading the otehr way….yes…parking lot
Aarthi: (i kinda said it out loud…and my bro was like dude if anyone
shashi coudl have handled it…
glad you didn’t do it that way)
me: I try to fairly aware when I’m walking so I already …
hahahaha….
awesome…
so I already notice these guys …
one asks me for the time…
which is a classic "cut the distance" move…
they ask you a question to get you thinking about something so that you don’t notice that they are fast approaching..
i pause for a moment, realize that its a cut the distance move…and keep walking toward my place…saying out lout it’s 9:30…
keep walking though…
guy pulls out a gun…I stop…
I get a feeling that it’s a toy gun…but no risk taking here…
Aarthi: dude i’m on the edge of my seat
me: ...guy is smart…keeps a few feet from me so that I have no chance of doing anythign…
Aarthi: AND WOULD YOU HAVE
me: probably not considering he wasn’t asking for my life and there were 4 others around..
not financial defense…
"gimme your shit"
"You want my bag?"
"Gimme ya wallet nigga"
Aarthi: Thank god you didn’t have you laptop
me: surprisingly calm…I move to get my wallet…
Aarthi: OR did
you
me: "Hurry up"
which is a funny command becasue I was always taught to move slowly…no sudden movements right…
give him the wallet
Aarthi: of course… but they want it fast
me: "Can I at least keep my driver’s lisence? You don’t need that"
Aarthi: I WAS just gonna ask
me: Looks into the wallet…pulls out the $100 in cash….I never carry cash…but this time I had some…thank goodness…
another dude "and the cell phone too…"
"alright"
Aarthi: wait so they gave you your wallet back
me: they take it and run away…
Aarthi: without the cash
me: dude drops the wallet on teh ground after taking the cash
Aarthi: ok ok
OH my god
me: A little adrenaline rush but I’m almost laughing…
One way to experience Kant is through a deep meditative immersion that allows you to swim through the subordinate clauses, which are numerous, if of questionable importance, to be sure, but force an active reading, and endless re-reading. If the previous sentence attempted an amateur performance of his sentence structures, what follows is another performance piece I will call “InDallyMashedupKantAlley.”
“Thus although it cannot determine anything a priori with regard to IDZ_IDZ_IDZ_IDZ_IDZ_IDZ___dnaaaa dna dna dnaaaa___IDZdna_IDZdna_IDZdnaa those IDZdna (objects), IDZdna Thus although it cannot IDZdna IDZdna”I think I will submit that to Joel for the Wayne Lit Review, along with this second poem:
Want to witness a magic trick?
Yay! I love magic!
Ok, calm down zippy. This is a special trick that you can actually experience in your own life and self, given of course that you are not one who refuses the existence of an essentialized stable self based on some kind of Cartesian ontolotogical…
Umm…can we start the trick please…
(murmurs something evil) Ok. So this is what you do. For three straight weeks, get up around 6:30 in the morning, complete your entire morning routine and be at the office by 9:30…
I’m a burgeoning scholar; I have no need to play by bourgeois ‘work time’ schedule.
No, listen. You do this of your own volition so that you can 1) take care of all those bureaucratic loose ends 2) have a rigorous discipline that allows you to maximum space for productivity.
All right, you may continue.
So; you establish this schedule that allows for approximately 12 solid hours of work and another 4 hours for your meditations, martial arts practice and hygienic duties. You continue this for 3 really strong productive weeks.
That sounds good…
Doesn’t it. You will begin to build momentum, perform your tasks with greater peace and concentration, be more efficient..
Oh wow, is that the magic?
No no, that’s just the start. You begin to accelerate, grow more determined, and more convinced that this semester is going to be the strongest ever..
That must be the magic!
Nope. The magic happens when the universe shoves a barrel full of thick mucus in every breathing passage you have prevents you from thinking sleeping or functioning clearly makes you feel like you’re going to choke if you lay down announces drastic changes in plans so that you have rethink projects syllabi and plans gives you tremendously exciting prospects that will require the very discipline you began to instill before the crippling snot suspended all hope which surprisingly stays alive despite the overmedicated dull hazy consciousness you are slowly normalizing as your own mode.
Uh-huh. How is that magical exactly?
Quiet you. You’re just an imaginary voice used to create a situation where I can vent my frustrations in a clever mode and avoid the always annoying voice of self-pity.
Ah, am I the imaginary or are you?
I’m Keyser Soze biatch…
My unimitable nephew dismisses televised rhetoirc as mere lip play…
...then explores the interface between proprioception and alternate states of consciousness…
An ungendered parental figure turns beast, vampire like, and begins to ravage those around me. I scramble around the cramped space as I see the creature approaching, open the car door and run out. Looking back for a brief moment, I see the figure with a glib smile and I realize that fleeing will only delay the inevitable. The realization is joined with a passing panic quickly transformed into acceptance. I seat myself on the ground, seiza (Japanese formal kneeling), and take a meditation posture.
A calm female face in white lab coat tells me that she will inject me with an episode-causing agent––they need my body to produce an antibody, I think. Another figure behind me holds my body as the shocks course through my cells; I’m strangely calm considering this is a heart attack. The eyes cannot roll back, they are fixated forward forced to imbibe the idiocy of spasms, the helpless horizontal orientation in the figure’s hands.
The photos that were once reminders of a beautiful lost turn into visionary documents of an ethereal future, born in its practice.
Survival of the fittest: 3 posts in 1
Temporal play has long fascinated me, ever since watching episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that offered a rethinking of the space-time continuum and the epistemic modalities encompassed within it. However, I have only recently become cognizant of my own slavish adherence to linearity in my practical affairs and the potential damage this has to my ability to be a high functioning academic. The stringent, assembly line like, focus is the consequence of an immature understanding of Zen in martial arts.
The notion of focus, complete and utter concentration, was greatly emphasized in my practice. I, however, began to interpret that as an avoidance of all other tasks, projects, spaces until my object of focus had been completely finished. This initial understanding has grounded much of my day-to-day life and its larger frame.
As I write this, however, a larger emotional tide has drowned me in the realization that linearity may have also cost me a relationship. Reading one book to the end before picking up another that is also due, finishing one paper before even beginning another, and other similarly small tasks may not be the sole victims of a rigidly linear mode. This part of my life is dedicated to X, while the next phase––post doctorate to tenure––will be dedicated to Y; this leaves no room for Y to show itself in the same room X is, thus shutting the door on possibly productive cognitive tangents.
———————————————————
I hit random on my hip-hop collection and stumbled on a gem that I had long ignored; Mobb Deep The Infamous, specifically “Eye for an eye (your beef is mines).”
Chorus:
As time goes by, an eye for an eye
We in this together son your beef is mines
So long as the sun shines to light up the sky
We in this together son your beef is mines
Interestingly, I heard this song just after reading “From Citizen to Volunteer: Neoliberal Governance and the Erasure of Poverty” by Susan Brin Hyatt, which makes a compelling case for the complex social relationships already functioning within impoverished communities. “That is, informal structures of reciprocity…have long flourished among the poor. Such relationships of mutuality do not arise autochthonously but have emerged in response to the exigencies posed by state policy.”
A long running trope in hip-hop is the interwoveness of federal and state policy, especially in terms of police injustice—the “Jake”—and local solidarity organized around race, class and age—the ghetto black youth. I had never thought of gangsterism as a mode of social solidarity in the same way more ‘legitimate’ neighborhood organizations and efforts are cognized. While this struck me as interesting in itself, I was also struck with a new sense of aesthetic appreciation grounded in the radical political gesture such productions manifest; radical not for the notions of resistance, but for the politics of solidarity that are both a response to and a product of government policy.
—————————————————————————
I went out to lunch with Kristine and had the briefest of conversations about a framed photograph on the restaurant wall; a series of smoke stacks that cast a shadow modified to look like classic Greek columns.
Me: “Why is everything so didactic?”
KFD: “Because that’s bad art.”
Indeed. However, a strange tangential rumination this afternoon bore a new thought. Perhaps such didactic productions are necessary as initial forays into self-reflexive thought. My command of aesthetic forms and their politics is minimal, so bear with me. When I pursued this line, didactic as necessary, it occurred to me that we have been influenced greatly by such productions, if only in the early stages of politicization, which is precisely the space that interests me here. At age 5 or 50, it seems to me that we have gone through a moment when such productions actually bore an insight into larger conditions and our relationship to them. Now, however, when such critiques blaring a message that has already been internalized, they become are banal, reductive clichés.
me: am I really?
friend: uh…are you seriously asking me?
me: yeah. I never thought of myself as a metrosexual
friend: (rolls eyes) yes. the answer is yes.
me: well, I’m not as bad as some other Indian males; they get their eyebrows done.
friend: yea, you’re not as metro as that.
insideme: Hmm…I’m strangely offended by this.
For more fun with metrosexuality, or if you are looking to burn a few brain cells, take a look at definitions of the term here, here and here.
blog: Where have you been?
me: Ummm…not sure; it was this really gray place with perpetual guilt and frustration.
otherme: Oh please! You’re just scared that your profs will wonder where their papers are if you keep the blog up.
blog: But I need attention too.
otherme: Quiet you! You’re nothing more than another avenue that draws the world-conquering perfectionism away from its needed spaces.
me: are either of you real?
otherme: are you? now mush
me; why are you so hostile?
blog: yea; you’re what’s preventing new pictures and links to be posted
otherme: That’s it! Shut this computer off and go grade papers, and for pete’s sake, quit trying to think of an clever close to this schizophrenic conversation you have going…what a weirdo…
“What’s it like?” I ask.
“Remember that Indiana Jones movie?” replies Love’s minion deceptively robed in white, “That scene where the oriental pulls that other oriental’s heart out, and it’s still beating despite being removed form the very space that allows it to function and be functional and or be useful, depending on your own terminological propensity …”
I gasp wondering how one could make such a long convoluted sentence….and at the image…
“A bit like that, except I enjoy a more nuanced extraction, namely through the nasal passageway, since that is a far more obscure method and, more importantly, because it is forced to undergo massive constriction fooling you for one, for me especially enjoyable, moment, into believing that it may have obliterated itself, but then expands again when it hits the nostrils and spills out in a glorious burst of pain and carnage made all the worse by, and this is my specialty, the cord of raw nerve that refuses to break despite the assault inevitable of coming into open contact with the outside world, inexorably leading you to question the very purpose of Being and just then…”
Whoa, I think to myself, who was this minion’s English teacher?
The excerpt from my Tamburlaine paper is highly dubious but being worked over as we speak. Perhaps the central issue, as I see it, is the inaccurate deployment of the terms “universal” and “particular.” Although I meant “universal” in the sense of “absolute generality”––a crude version of Kant’s categorical imperative––“particular” remained an implied and rather misunderstood term.
I was also gently reminded that I need not wage an interstellar battle between Kierkegaard, Hegel and Tamburlaine in this paper. Although this is something like telling a depressed person to smile more (a line from Semenza), I’m trying to invoke the advice as much as possible.
And for no good reason, a picture of my baby nephew: (note the ‘36’ on his hoody; born Wu fan)
Despite the lack of rigor, this fantastically interesting article can be forgiven both because it is meant for a broad audience and because it takes up so many issues that I implicitly raise in my commentary on the kinetic beauty of sports. Also, I am using this writing as a way to reenergize my cognition.
Stanford’s Hans Gumbrecht has clearly been reading my blog and stealing ideas to create his new work, In Praise of Athletic Beauty. Using Kantian aesthetic theory, which I have little knowledge of, Gumbrecht argues that beautiful sports plays “give a distinct ‘impression of purposivensess’.” However, the article’s author argues, I think rightly, that a great deal of “aesthetic clout” comes from the context of an athletic feat; the buzzer beating shot, the overtime goal and such are, of course, much more ‘pleasurable’ than any shot, any goal, and heightened all the more when done in the playoffs, Olympics or World Cup tournament.
More interestingly, and in conversation with Kristine’s post on experiencing the self, the article engages David Foster Wallace’s attempt to reconcile “the incredible banality with which athletes typically talk about [their] extraordinary abilities and accomplishments.” Wallace concludes that neither a lack of intelligence or articulation explains this phenomena, but is instead a necessary condition of an athlete’s ability. That is, precisely because they move and perform in a space outside (beside?) the intellect they are able to accomplish the extraordinary. However, this space cannot then be communicated or explained in the intellect and must needs be relegated to banal commentary, i.e. “I feel great,” “I saw the shot and took it.” Wallace’s argument can best be understood in his own succinct language; “that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it––and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence."
This is precisely the paradox of an immersive experience, or experience generally, because an athlete’s success in those tense moments is built on the ability to shut down or void the thinking, reflective, critiquing self; athletes occupy another space which is voided the moment one tries to communicate it. However, there seems to be an interesting correlation between athletic or kinetic immersion and intellectual immersion, which at its highest level, produces the moment of insight. The clarity achieved in these moments is both immersive and perfectly self-articulate, but all within an interior space-time that mutates (if not annulled) in its contact with the external. In contradistinction to intellectual immersion, kinetic or bodily ‘wholeness’ achieves perfect articulation in the external through the perfect movement/ action but must remain internally aloof. Thus, rewriting Kristine’s observations into a question of athleticism, is it possible to be both kinetically and intellectually immersed? Is it possible to experience internal self-articulate insight while experiencing a, or perhaps through, kinetic immersion that achieves external articulation in its perfect performance.
My overall plan for my courses is to juxtapose very serious readings with comedic texts (shows, specials etc) to examine the intersections and chasms between them. I’ve begun the semester with two short articles, one on Affirmative action and the other on the socio-political state of black men, and clashed them with a Family Guy episode in which Peter learns that he has a black ancestor. Moreover, he learns that his wife’s extremely wealthy family owned his ancestor, prompting him to ask for reparations.
For anyone familiar with the show, or others like it (South Park, Simpsons etc.) you need not be told that the show handles this material with little tact. Rather, we are beaten with blunt comedy.
Understandably, some of my students had visceral reactions to the show finding it crass, simplistic, and a serious issue’s reduction into dirty (non) humor rubble. My question to them specifically and the class generally was simply, why make a show like this? Once we flushed out the basic supply/ demand economic incentive the broader question became what makes such shows possible, viable as entertainment, and even demanded as such? (FG was actually cancelled after they aired a show called “Wish upon a Weinstein” but because of its cult hit status was brought on again to produce new episodes)
I dare not offer any answers to these questions lest my student’s take on my reading as their own and parrot it to me in their papers. However, I do want to clarify and emphasize why it is that I want to push these issues in my classroom.
My interest is two fold. First, I genuinely (if naively) believe that the classroom is one of the few places left where such issues can still be discussed, argued, and flushed out without recourse to verbal or emotional violence. Secondly, comedy (broadly defined) has been a crucial medium for the exploration of social contradictions, foregrounding their absurdity while simultaneously calling attention to its own structure of address.
My dear offended students, don’t shy away from the subject or its mode of delivery but put that energy into your writing, focus it to negate each text’s ideas through rigorous examination and logical dismantling. After all, being offended or even bothered by anything presented is, to me, a firm affirmation that some political neurons are firing.
Walking north on Cass around midnight, I see a drunken homeless man deliberately on a trajectory to intersect me. I prepare myself for any potential hostility and pull off my headphones because I can see that he is trying to say something to me. I don’t break stride:
Man: Yo, Saddam
Me: I’m sorry, what? (I really didn’t hear what he said)
Man: You Saddam right? Saddam Bin Laden right?
Me: [laugh]
Man: You look just like him; Saddam Bin Laden right?
Me: word
Man: Yo man, how you keep them planes in the air?
Me: I don’t know man
Man: Oil right? Why you holdin out?
Me: word
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