Shades of Eternal Night

R.I.P. Cy Twombly

[Image taken from here]

Home is where the hatred is

privacy of self-
righteousness

the need to be/long

these are the songs
you were born to

battle lines drawn
in the powdered cocaine

white as the snow
on TV

a frenzy contained
disconnection

you claim
for your own

home

more a direction
than a state

an addiction
to hate

you run away from
come back to

refrain

***

Where does it stop?

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?

Opportunity.
Or the cops.

You think this is a joke?

this is your mouth talking smack
these are your words up in smoke

this is the man at the door
come to repossess your pride

this is the voice you keep inside

this is the rainbow of no choice
on a blood-slicked street

this is the sound of your feet
in the neighborhood of soul

the sound of defeat

the sound of illegal heartbeats
brought and sold
on every street corner

this is the dream of honor
deferred

of violence betrayed

in words
in breath

the instruments we have left
uniting to say

the day of your death
was a black Black day.


R.I.P. Gil Scott-Heron

Links:

the song this post takes its title from
NY Times obit
New Yorker profile

Bhimsen

R.I.P. Bhimsen Joshi (1922-2011)


When you sang the Malhar
we could hear the trees growing,
hear the wood’s ancient
longing for rain,

your voice a season
exquisite with languor,
wild thunders tamed
to the purposes of song.

The night you sang Vande Mataram
we wanted to sing along,
your voice on the loudspeakers
flattened, distorted,

yet deep enough to contain
all our contradictions:
fifty years of freedom
and a tradition

older than grief.
That’s why I have to believe
you will outlast this pyre,
your throat an ember

burning pure and blue,
a constant outpouring,
at the center of the fire, a flame
endlessly wavering, endlessly true.

Our loss...

...is heaven's gain.

R.I.P. Blake Edwards

The stupid gardener

plants too many seeds.

No one really needs
a thousand flowers

no matter how sincere
their devotion to the sun;

haphazard as explosions
that do no damage

they are acts of pure sentiment
or failed attempts at speech,

predictable products of their season
and species

that a more discerning hand
would swiftly prune.

It takes a special kind
of stubbornness

to let them all bloom,
to bask content

in these riches
of embarrassment,

each awkward bud granted
its broken ground,

its mouth of air.

A special kind of madness to plant
flowers everywhere,

knowing that one or two
are all that will bear

fruit, all that will last;
to know the futility of the task,

and care enough
not to care.


R.I.P. P. Lal

Blindness

a way of seeing
the invisible.


R.I.P. Jose Saramago

Peter Orlovsky 1933 - 2010

No, the madness didn't destroy him. He outlived them all: Cassady, Kerouac, Allen himself. Survived the drugs and the alcohol, the sex and the protests, to die unoutrageously of lung cancer at the age of 76.

No, he was not his animal. In the poems he is an altogether quieter, more domestic presence, a shadow you barely see. And yet he is there on the front page of Kaddish, an angel of grief, and there again twenty years later, lending his back and strong shoulders to Ginsberg Sr., being told not to grow old, and (as we now know) ignoring the advice. He is there in the elegies to O'Hara and Cassady, lending his sympathetic ear and voice to the general sorrow. Again and again, when death intercedes, he is there to comfort, console.

When they first met, half a century ago, Allen wrote:

"discovered a new young cat,
and my imagination of an eternal boy
walks on the streets of San Francisco,
handsome, and meets me in cafetarias
and loves me."

and here they are, 40 years later, two old men sitting in companionable silence around a dining table; two bowls, chipped and almost empty, laid side by side.


No, he wasn't the best mind of his generation. But what he was, and what he had, is hard not to envy. And if even some of the power of those poems draws strength from his presence, that is more than most of us can hope to contribute.

Notes:

Ginsberg quote taken from 'Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo' . Ginsberg and Orlovsky image taken from this piece by Gordon Ball in Jacket, July 2007.

E-2 Brutus

Yet more evidence of the NY Times inability to do math / willingness to turn almost anything into a puff piece:

Over the last two and a half years, 8,468 requests for E-2 extensions have been filed, and their approval rate does appear to have dropped, according to figures provided by William G. Wright, a spokesman for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. So far in the 2010 fiscal year, he said, 82 percent of the applications have been approved. In 2009, 84 percent were approved, and in 2008, 91 percent.

This from a piece that talks about "the forgotten story of immigration" and the trend towards more E-2 application rejections.

Never mind the deduction of a 'trend' from three data points. Never mind that without more information it's impossible to tell whether an 8 percentage point drop in approvals is significant and / or whether 91 percent in 2008 was average or high. Never mind that it seems fairly reasonable, given what the economy has been like the last few years, to suppose that an additional 10% or so of people may have seen a drop in their income which would put them in a marginal income category.

Even if you buy these numbers completely, we're still talking about 8, 468 requests in 2.5 years = 1,700 requests in the last six months, 8% of which is 136. That's all of 136 additional people who've been denied visas this year as a result of this frightening new trend. Maybe there's a reason it's a forgotten story.

The Kaczynski funeral

There is ash in heaven today. Flight is repudiated, gravity made more profound. In the dove-cotes of Europe the planes hold their wings out in impotent salute. And we walk under an invisible cloud, conscious of broken connections, of lost homecomings, of the absences that will stand beside us, their shoulders too light for our grief.

Truth is stranger than fiction, and more lyrical than poetry.

In Dubious Battle

or Why Arundhati Roy is a Waste of Space

The first thing that occurred to me, after I finished reading Arundhati Roy's article on the rebels in the Dantewada forest in Outlook (hat-tip: SB), was how fundamentally unconvincing the whole piece was [1]. This, it seems to me, is mostly Roy's fault. One page through the eight pages of the article it's pretty clear where Roy's sympathies lie, and those sympathies proceed to systematically undermine any credibility her article might have otherwise had.

The problem is not that Roy sympathizes with the cause of the rebels, even though that sympathy seems less about the specific problems of the people of Dantewada and more about Roy's own long-standing position against government / big business / institutions generally. The problem is that Roy seems incapable of admitting the slightest nuance into her support for the rebels. Hers in the unquestioning belief of the true zealot, and the blindness of her convictions renders her incapable of anything approaching intelligent analysis. Not only does Roy seem to enter Dantewada with an entirely uncritical perspective [2], when potential criticisms of the rebels do occur to her she provides her own justifications for their actions, without even bothering to put these criticisms to the people she is profiling. As a result, we learn what Roy thinks the rebels are thinking, rather than what they really are thinking. I can't think of a worse waste of journalistic access. The result is a piece so partisan as to be virtually propaganda.

Worse, when the rebels do tell her things, Roy seems happy to believe them without the slightest corroboration. It never seems to occur to her that there may be two sides to the stories she's being told, or that the rebels, may, in fact, be feeding her misinformation [3]. No effort is made to speak to anyone outside the rebel troops (like, say, villagers who are not part of the 'army'), nor does Roy ask any questions about how the operations of the rebels are financed, how their 'soldiers' are recruited, how decisions about attacks are made, etc. The irony here is that Roy is strident in declaring our need to be wary of official news reports about the Dantewada situation, yes she seems just as credulous when it comes to swallowing whatever she is told by the rebels.

A sense of irony, alas, is the other quality completely missing from Roy's report, a shocking omission for someone who used to write fiction. In one passage, Roy quotes a young rebel called Nilesh, describing his brother, who has become a Special Police Officer:

“He was very young,” Nilesh said, “he got an opportunity to run wild and hurt people and burn houses. He went crazy, did terrible things. Now he is stuck. He can never come back to the village. He will not be forgiven. He knows that.”

The irony, of course, is that the same description could be applied to Nilesh himself. He too is very young. He too has got an opportunity to run wild and hurt people. He too is (probably) stuck and will not be forgiven.

Again and again through the piece Roy speaks of the rebels as children, describing herself, at one point, as being "surrounded by these strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal". Ironically, this only serves to discredit the rebels, because it raises serious questions about whether they know what they're doing. It does not, however, as Roy seems to think, make them seem less of a threat. I don't know about you, but personally I can think of few things more dangerous than sophisticated weaponry in the hands of angry children, and if that's what the rebels are (since that's what Roy seems to make them out to be) then we have even more reason to be afraid.

(I'm particularly bewildered by Roy's account of one Kamla, whose beautiful smile receives a lot of attention in the article. As though her having a beautiful smile somehow made her less violent or dangerous.)

The larger problem, I think, is that Roy's is a curiously binary world view, a world divided into good and evil, right and wrong. (Ironically, again, this is a world view shared by no one so closely as the erstwhile Bush administration that Roy claims to despise). Since government and big corporations are evil, it must follow that whoever opposes them, by whatever means, is good, and the means themselves justified. Roy's identification of the rebels with the 'people' is automatic and unswerving - it never occurs to her that there may be more than two sides to the conflict. What reason, after all, do we have to believe that the rebels represent the interests of the people of Dantewada? They claim to do so, certainly, but so does the government, and it's not clear to me that one claim is any more legitimate than the other. Terrorists everywhere are quick to claim the people's backing - are we to accept that the Taliban speaks for the Afghan people, that the Shining Path speaks for the people of Peru, that Al Qaeda speaks for Muslims everywhere? In each of these cases, the organization in question represents itself as the people's champion, yet there is considerable reason to believe that a significant majority of the people they claim to represent consider their ideas wrong-headed and their presence a source of fear. Just because the government and big corporations are evil and oppressive (and let's say, for the moment, that they are), doesn't mean the rebels aren't as well. Just because the government and big corporations don't have the people's best interests at heart, doesn't mean the rebels do.

Understand that I'm not saying that the rebels in Dantewada are like the Taliban or Al Qaeda. I'm saying that Roy's piece provides no evidence that they're not. Nothing in her report suggests that the rebels are legitimate representatives of their people's interests. On the contrary, I'm willing to bet that you could write a piece virtually identical to Roy's article about almost any terrorist organization in the world - they're all sure to have smiling, beautiful children as recruits.

I titled this post In Dubious Battle, because reading Roy's descriptions I was reminded of nothing so much as Milton's Pandemonium:

"that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit,
That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd
That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd"

- Milton, Paradise Lost Book I

To recognize this is to remember that it is easy to romanticize rebellion, easy to cast the outsider as hero. If Roy's description of the Dantewada rebellion has an almost mythic quality (and it does - reading her description of the forest celebrations I found myself imagining Friar Tuck putting in an appearance, surrounded by men in Lincoln Green), it is because she sees it through red-tinted glasses (pun intended), and that is reason to be suspicious of the veracity of her account.

In her piece, Roy attempts to justify the rebel's actions on utilitarian grounds, arguing that it is the only solution available to the 'people' because all other avenues are bound to prove unsuccessful (even though it's unclear, from her account at least, whether all other avenues have, in this particular case, been tried).

Even if one were willing to accept that there were no other options, and that violence, in such a case, is justified, one is forced to ask - is violence really a solution? What, realistically, are the odds of the rebels winning? Are they significantly better than the odds of success from more peaceful means of protest? And in the meantime, are the people of Dantewada better or worse off than they would have been without the armed rebellion? Based purely on Roy's piece, it sounds to me like the rebels have only made things worse for the people of Dantewada. On the one hand, they have undermined the potential for widespread public support that a more peaceful movement that brought the plight of the Dantewada people to public attention may have enjoyed, and compromised the efforts of any and all activists trying to further the people's interests by other means [4]. On the other hand, they have made the tribal people fair game for those who are trying to oppress them / drive them out. Roy talks a lot about genocide and Salwa Judum, but could these atrocities really exist without the sceptre of the Maoists to provide them cover? It seems to me that the Salwa Judum needs the Maoists, and that by choosing the path of violence the rebels have played straight into the hands of the very interests that seek to destroy them. This is not to suggest that Salwa Judum's actions are justified, or that the rebels have brought this on themselves. It is only to say that if realpolitik be thy plea, as Roy's is here, then it is worth considering that the rebel's path leads, realistically, to a worse outcome for their alleged people than ever before.

(There is the separate question of whether, if the rebels did somehow miraculously succeed, this would actually result in empowerment of the people. Nothing in the history of communism suggests this would be true, but never mind.)

But of course, these ideas are largely Roy's own, and there is little evidence that they are shared by the rebels themselves. In fact, from Roy's account, there is little evidence of anything resembling a larger plan in the rebel's actions. For the most part, the rebels she talks to seem to be motivated by frustration catalyzed by a need for revenge. Reprisal, indeed, seems to be the dominant theme of the article, with the motif of 'they did something bad to us, so we did something bad to them' cropping up again and again (the question of what preceded the bad thing they did is, of course, never asked). These sort of childish (children again!) he-hit-me-first protestations hardly amount to a political philosophy, much less a political agenda. It seems a travesty to call these people Maoists, when from Roy's account they seem to have little idea who Mao was or what he believed in. And it seems misguided to think of this rebellion as a 'revolution' when there seems to be little evidence of a coherent end game or of strong visionary leadership.

What emerges from Roy's account, when you read beneath her naive and breathless paeans to the wonders of the forest and the beauty of the child soldiers, is a portrait of a splinter group of disenchanted people driven to embrace violence by frustration, anger and a thirst for revenge, all cloaked in trappings usurped from the Maoist playbook. What emerges is a portrait of children indoctrinated into a way of violence through the constant repetition of a litany of evils real and imagined, without any sense of the larger issues or the true history of the communist movement [5]. But most of all, what emerges is the portrait of a writer so in love with her own indignation that she's unable to ask even the basic questions that any reasonable adult would want to raise.

If you really want to learn about Maoist rebellions, watch Woody Allen's Bananas. You'll learn about as much there as you will from Roy's piece.

[1] I lie. The first thing that occurred to me was how much like the script for Avatar the whole thing sounded. But this was a close second.

[2] I have to wonder whether her being uncritical was a factor in her getting the kind of access she did.

[3] I mean seriously. If you were a rebel organization and a celebrity reporter from a major national news magazine was coming to do a cover story on you, wouldn't you manipulate every piece of information she got to make yourself look good and your enemy look bad?

[4] The other reason I titled this piece In Dubious Battle was in homage to Steinbeck's lovely novel of the same name, which deals with another group of communist workers trying to win rights for workers. Unlike the rebels, however, the means they employ do not involve using guns and explosives. Now there's a set of communist activists I'd wholeheartedly support.

[5] This is, of course, the modus operandi of terrorist organizations everywhere. It is, indeed, how Hindutva recruits its most violent followers. Take a close look at the footage of the Babri Masjid demolition and you're sure to find plenty of children with beautiful smiles.

IWD

It's a little past midnight on International Women's Day, and Kathryn Bigelow just became the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar (yaay!).

I'm just saying. There are times to be dismissive of tokenism, but this is not one of them.

Unhappy Research

If you've been surfing the web lately, chances are you've come across some version of this news story about a research study that shows that New York is the unhappiest state in the country while Louisiana is the happiest. A finding that is, prima facie, ridiculous.

Before you start moving your family from Manhattan to New Orleans it's worth considering what's wrong with the story - which strikes me as being the perfect combination of dubious research wedded to journalistic misinterpretation.

As I understand it, Oswald and Wu basically construct a subjective measure of happiness by state by taking survey results on people's stated level of satisfaction and running a regression predicting these satisfaction levels as a function of a range of individual level attributes (such as income, education, employment category, etc.) plus dummies for each state (except Alabama - the omitted category). And therein lies the misinterpretation: the subjective coefficients they report are not telling us how happy people in each state are, they are telling us what the net effect of the state is after all other individual level factors are controlled for. In other words, the negative coefficient of New York means that a person with exactly the same income, education , employment, etc. would be less satisfied in New York than in Alabama.

Now, this would make sense if individual attributes that contributed to happiness were uncorrelated with state of residence, but this is clearly not the case. If states differ substantially in the average levels of happiness-causing attributes (i.e. if people in New York are likely to have higher levels of education, higher income, etc.) then the coefficients for the state dummies by themselves are not meaningful; in particular, we are likely to see a negative bias in the coefficients of states with high levels of positive attributes. What's more, this bias is going to be considerably amplified if the dependent variable of happiness / satisfaction is right-censored, that is to say if the measure of satisfaction used does not adequately capture differences in satisfaction levels at the higher end of the range (which, btw, is the case with the data used in the study - on a 1 to 4 scale the average score is 3.4).

To see this in (exceedingly) simple terms, imagine that we have only two people from two states - Louisiana (L) and New York (N); that we have only one other explanatory variable - Income (I); and that the satisfaction score for both people, on a 1 to 4 scale, is 4, i.e. they both claim to be 'Very Satisfied'. The regression would then try to solve

4=B1.Il + Bl

and

4=B1.In + Bn

where B1 is the coefficient for Income, Bl and Bn are the satisfaction coefficients for the states, and Il and In are the income levels of the person in Louisiana and the person in New York. Now, imagine that the person in New York has twice the income of the person in Louisiana. We then have

4=B1.Il + Bl = B1.In + Bn = B1.2Il + Bn

Now, if B1.Il + Bl = B1.2Il + Bn, and assuming B1>0 (more income means greater happiness), this would mean that Bl>Bn, i.e. the satisfaction coefficient of Louisiana is greater than the satisfaction coefficient of New York. Notice that this doesn't really mean anything about living in New York, it's simply an artifact of the fact that satisfaction measures top out at 4 and that New York has twice the income levels of Louisiana.

On the whole then, it's unclear that the coefficients of the state dummies actually mean anything. But even in the best case, all they mean is that moving from New York to Louisiana will increase your satisfaction, provided you can find the identical job and continue to make the same amount of money. Good luck with that.

Finally, let's think for a moment about the researcher's claim that their study shows a surprisingly strong correlation between subjective and objective measures of satisfaction. Again, let's think about what the subjective state coefficient really is. It's the average difference between the satisfaction of a person with a certain level of income (uncorrected for cost of living), education, etc. living in the focal state (New York) vs. a person with the same level of income, education, etc. living in Alabama. Now what might cause a person making the same dollar amount to be less satisfied in New York than in Alabama? Obviously, cost of living. And what is a major component of the 'objective' measure the study uses to rank states? Why, it's cost of living. Is it really surprising then that the two measures turn out to be highly correlated? I don't think so.

What would be interesting, of course, would be to see a version of the study that a) controlled for the location choices of individuals through some kind of simultaneous equation model and b) included income levels adjusted for cost of living in the regression equation to predict satisfaction levels. Then we might actually learn something.

Ironically, this is one instance where a naive application of the satisfaction scores - a simple table of the mean satisfaction scores by state - may actually be more accurate and representative than the subjective coefficients calculated by the authors. I'm not sure how the mean satisfaction score for New York compares to the mean satisfaction score for Louisiana, but I'd be amazed if New York scored lower than Louisiana, let alone if New York was the lowest of all states. Now that would be surprising.

Liu Xiaobo

Via the Pen American Center, a petition demanding the release of Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo.

Disaster 'Poetry'

Remember The Tay Bridge Disaster?

Well, McGonagall's poem now has a desi equivalent, in the shape of this piece of doggerel posted on the I'm a Bhopali site. Ms. Zaidi's poem is like an object lesson in the writing of juvenile verse - uninteresting rhymes[1], trite images, uncertain tone, lines that don't scan and the overwhelming impression that any sense the verse may once have had has been subordinated to the rhyme scheme. Old William would have been proud.

***

By contrast, the regular press actually managed to turn out a couple of good articles for the occasion, including a surprisingly decent NY Times Op-ed piece by Suketu Mehta and Indra Sinha's article for the Guardian. It's almost enough to restore one's faith in the MSM.

[1] For a contemporary example of what interesting rhymes might look (and sound) like, see here.

Injustice

In Memoriam Dec 3, 1984.

Because it goes
too easily unnoticed

is toxic but invisible,
impossible to touch, taste, smell or hear

impossible not to feel.

Because it pricks at our eyes,
corrupts our blood,

fills our lungs
until they refuse to balance,

weighs down our hearts.

Because it is passed down
from generation to generation

until death becomes
a byproduct

irrelevant yet necessary.

Because it's in the air
we continue to breathe,

the excuses we swallow,
the tears

we do not cry.


[Part of this (1)]


[1] Sort of. I'm not sure I entirely approve of the whole 'I'm a Bhopali' shtick - it strikes me as trivializing the suffering of the real victims. Which doesn't mean, of course, that the anniversary should go unmarked. Hence the post.

The Malignant and the Maligned

In other news, you may have seen this story about how couples are substantially more likely to get a divorce if the wife gets cancer than if the husband does, which has been doing the rounds.

What I find interesting about most of the discussion surrounding the story is how there's an implicit assumption that the 'proper' state of things would be for the partner to stick around. Personally, I'm a lot more shocked that more women don't leave, and can't help wondering if the difference isn't so much that men are that much more evil or selfish, but that women are that much more likely to be financially dependent on their spouses and therefore less able to walk away, or just that much more socialized into seeing themselves as doormats. In a truly gender equal world, would more men stay, or more women leave?

Humpty Dumpty Revisited

In memory of Nov 9, 1989

All the king's horses and all the king's men
Brought down the wall in a show of their strength
And when they were done breaking and hauling
They paid their respects to those who had fallen
Each one secretly wondering whether
What was broken could ever be put back together.

See also

More evidence that I'm a sociopath

"At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.” Gregory looked at photographs of other music posters owned by Willingham. “There’s a hooded skull, with wings and a hatchet,” Gregory continued. “And all of these are in fire, depicting—it reminds me of something like Hell. And there’s a picture—a Led Zeppelin picture of a falling angel. . . . I see there’s an association many times with cultive-type of activities. A focus on death, dying. Many times individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities.”

from David Grann's incredible must-read piece in this week's New Yorker.

While his guitars gently weep

RIP Les Paul

Something

Measure the magnitude of an injustice by the smallness of what counts as a triumph.

Not a victory, then, but an achievement, a giving way.

How obscene to have to celebrate this; to have to celebrate the fact that having sex with someone you love no longer makes you a criminal.

And for that reason alone, how necessary to celebrate it.

It's good to know that India has finally arrived in the 20th century. Here's hoping it doesn't take till 2109 to get to the 21st.