Here is a link to a story by an Arab journalist, Abdullah Al-Mutairi, about the way in which foreign workers, especially South Asians, are treated in Saudi Arabia. (Thanks again, Robin Khundkar.) The writer asks his compatriots: “Why is there so much hate inside us?” I liked very much the article’s concluding lines:

I remember when I was in England last summer, arriving at the front door of the house where I was staying. I saw a little girl standing outside the house next to mine. I wondered if she would curse me or throw stones at me or whether she would just look away in disgust. Instead, she carried on watering the flowers in the small garden; then she looked up and waved at me, with a big smile on her face. Could that have happened here?

The photograph above by Jamie Francis comes from an excellent report, back in 2002, in the St Petersburgh Times, about migrant workers, including women, in Saudi Arabia.

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If you visit this site, you’ll discover a lot about toilets. I was there after my friend Robin Khundkar sent me a link to an article “Indian award not going down the toilet”: the government in India has been giving rural households a subsidy of 500 rupees (about 11 dollars) to install a pit, a porcelain basin, and walls. Here’s a quote from the article:

India has been grappling with this problem, in vain, for decades. Mahatma Gandhi said sanitation was “more important than freedom.” Jawarharlal Nehru, the former prime minister, once said, “The day everyone of us gets a toilet to use, I shall know that our country has reached the pinnacle of progress.”

This post is especially for my comrade Vijay Prashad who not only shares my obsession with toilets, but links it forcefully to the goal of political emancipation.

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A student in my Freshman English class said yesterday that whenever he sits down to write he does two things about the subject he has been given: one, he tries to find a personal angle into the material, and second, he tries to think positive thoughts about it. The second point puzzled me. I asked him to explain and he said that any writing he produces is not going to be “balanced” if he is only thinking bad things about what he is supposed to write. I was wondering how to take the class discussion forward with the point he had made–I was at a loss, actually–when the student himself offered me a way out. He asked me if I could think of a book-review where the reviewer hated the book–and the review had still turned out to be interesting. The dark pedagogical clouds suddenly parted; the name “Dale Peck” flashed like lightning in the air.

“Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” Like everyone else who ever invokes Peck’s name, I repeated the well-known line from his review. Here, dear students, is the whole review; but, if you’re going to go ahead and read it, please also read Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Peck’s “hatchet jobs” in the NYRB. Mendelsohn admits that Peck’s detractors are not more fun to read, but they might be right about a couple of things. “There is, to begin with, the problem of overkill… and second, that what’s really going on here isn’t so much criticism as a kind of performance—it’s as if Peck wants to show you not what’s wrong with [the writer under review], but how good a writer he, Peck, is.”

In India, in the pages of the Hindu, Pradeep Sebastian wrote: “We need an Indian Dale Peck to closely and accurately assess some of our more mediocre and overrated writers. Peck’s great gift is to show — not tell — us where a writer has gone wrong. ‘The massive literary advances and domination of display and review space have crowded out competitors,’ he objects to James Atlas. ‘The lavish praise critics bestow on contemporary fiction renders them complicit in its mediocrity.’” I support what Sebastian is saying, but I also think that in India, in particular, there is also another problem. The enemy is not only mediocrity, it is also malice; and I have nowhere else read criticism that is so driven by matters utterly extraneous to literary merit. Peck is a critic who probably less than most will give people reason to pause before dispensing judgment. But Sebastian is right to advocate a more critical practice. Here’s another nugget from Peck in an interview in the Guardian (Thanks, Maud Newton):

When I ask him to characterise the US reviewing scene, he cheers up: ‘I am not sure if you can print this. But they are a bunch of pussies. They are back-scratchers, afraid for their own careers - novelists reviewing their friends’ works. It is very dishonest.’ Does he ever worry about the effect his reviews may have on writers? ‘The truth is that if you can’t hack a negative review, you shouldn’t be writing at that particular level. I really do believe a novel is nothing more than a strongly expressed opinion and that you need to respond strongly and with vitality.’

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Shibu Natesan, “At Kanyakumary,” 2006.
Earlier this evening, I posted a blog about art in New York City, or at least, art about New York City. And then I remembered a painting on display at Gallery ArtsIndia. (The painting is in the city but it is not about the city at all; it is about a scene far-away in southern India.) My earlier blog was partly about how to write about art, or how to find in words a response to art, especially art that seemed unfamiliar to me and about a space that is still unfamiliar to me. And then I thought of Natesan’s painting, because there is something in my response to it that I recognize as direct and emotional.

I do not need to go looking for a language to describe it. Or a language to describe my own reaction to it. But this exchange too is mediated by language and by memory.

When I saw Natesan’s painting, I was struck by its dynamism, of course, and by the figure of the boy, hooded and lost in a world of his own. He is so light and so whole; the artist has not even included the spectators! I’d like to think it is only because the boy cannot see them.

A memory came back to me. This memory was of a photograph, reproduced on the cover of Rohinton Mistry’s book, A Fine Balance. A little girl stands atop a long pole that is balanced precariously, expertly, on a human thumb. (Does the thumb belong to a man who finds a child of a very particular size and weight to present his trick? Is it possible that the little girl is his own child? Does that increase the drama of the danger? What when the girl grows up, grows heavier? Is the family caught in a cycle of forced growth?)

I have never been an admirer of Mistry’s fiction. In his writing, sentiment dominates knowledge; I find statements there, not curiosity. It isn’t that I think the photograph is better than the book: I think both of them are locked in the barreness of their own formal engagement, and aren’t really interested in any of the questions that I have asked above. As a result there is no precision. Is it only the sharp lines that define the painting of the boy walking on the tightrope that make it difficult for me to say the same about Natesan?

I suspect there’s more. The painting makes no claims to documentary status. I find a resting place in the imagination where all its lines meet. It is significant that the artist has so drawn the picture that its central point also happens to be the place where land meets sea. The boy has one leg planted on that place of rest; his right leg is moving forward, and with all my heart I am cheering him on.

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n+1 magazine asks you to consider writing about art, or, more precisely, about art that represents New York City. Here you have Roger White writing on the art of Marvin Gates:

The simplifications in Gates’s paintings don’t exactly simplify things. Instead, the starkness provides a way for ordinary things to be themselves and also mysteriously otherwise. Hydrants are sculptures, people are mannequins, and a skull has a personality. Like his ambiguous abbreviations for objects, Gates’s spatial shorthand disrupts easy reading. Receding planes tip toward the viewer, volumes empty out, and distances shrink and grow unpredictably. Gates invites the viewer in only to confront her with bizarre disjunctions and anomalies. He builds trapdoors in Renaissance space.

This quintessentially modernist tactic cools down the emotional heat of the subject, Death. The drama enacted in the paintings, in which a sneaker-clad reaper takes to the streets of New York and ultimately disembodies in a funeral parlor, is rendered in a visual language suggesting a goal of order and rationality in figurative art long absent from critical discourse. The series of four paintings is like a eulogy delivered in Esperanto.

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NY Times
John & Jane Toll-Free
 Directed by Ashim Ahluwalia
6 p.m. today, Museum of Modern Art; Thursday 8:45 p.m., Walter Reade Theater

Behind the polite voices with Indian accents selling goods and services to Americans from a giant call center in Bombay are real people with real lives wearing headsets that plug them in to the American dream. Because of the time difference between the United States and South Asia, the peak hours for this grueling 14-hour-a-day outsourced labor are after midnight. The HBO documentary follows six young Indian telemarketers, who are given assumed American names, drilled in English pronunciation and indoctrinated in American popular culture.
More impressionistic than pointedly journalistic, the disquieting movie looks with a raised eyebrow at the grass-roots creation of workaholic, robotically friendly sales workers eager to shed their national identity. One or two rebel, but the majority, who are paid a fourth of what an American would get for the same work, enthusiastically embrace their career opportunities. The most extreme eager beaver sleeps while playing motivational tapes, cites Elvis Presley and Engelbert Humperdinck as his role models and naïvely announces his determination to be a billionaire. STEPHEN HOLDEN

Also see excellent reviews in Slant Magazine and in Spiegel Online.

A beach blonde Indian call center worker. From Spiegel Online: “Ahluwalia’s call center workers are living virtual lives over the electronic signal exchange as self-created avatars, basking in the blue glow of monitors at the call center in the futuristic ‘Fourth Dimension’ building in Mumbai. ‘It reminds me of one of those 1970s science fiction B movies you would see as a kid, like ‘Brainstorm’,’ he says. ‘Their lives are closer to science fiction.’”

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Photo (Bob Chamberlin / LAT)
Caption: Thousands protest against House-passed HR 4437, an anti-immigration bill that opponents say will criminalize millions of immigrant families and anyone who comes into contact with them.

Here’s the beginning of the report from the Los Angeles Times:

Joining what some are calling the nation’s largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting “Si se puede!” (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants.

The marchers included both longtime residents and the newly arrived, bound by a desire for a better life and a love for this country.

The New York Times report on the march in L.A. notes that despite the talk of security concerns, “the legislation would hurt Hispanics the most.” It then offers the following, somewhat searching, and also somewhat tarnished, statement from a marcher:

“When did you ever see a Mexican blow up the World Trade Center? Who do you think built the World Trade Center?'’ said David Gonzalez, 22, who marched in Los Angeles with a sign that read, ‘’I'm in my homeland.'’

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Gary Shteyngart’s fiction “A Love Letter” in this week’s New Yorker begins with this paean to the Immigration and Naturalization Service:

First, I would like to fall on my knees in front of the I.N.S. headquarters in Washington, D.C., and thank the organization for its successful work on behalf of foreigners everywhere. I’ve been welcomed by I.N.S. representatives several times upon arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport, and each time was better than the last. Once, a jolly man in a turban stamped my passport after saying something incomprehensible. Another time, a pleasant black lady nearly as large as myself looked appreciatively at my stomach and gave me the thumbs-up. What can I say? The I.N.S. people are just and fair. They are true gatekeepers of America.

Can anyone but recent immigrants to the English language whip up such passion, faked or otherwise, not only for the I.N.S., but also for uninhibited speech? Gary Shteyngart is the new avatar, in the age of globalization, of Saul Bellow’s Augie March. The relentless over-the-top-humor might become a bit taxing, and lose a bit of its critical purchase on reality, however bizzare such reality might be, but this is definitely a very engaging voice and also a voice that can be as global as McDonald’s and Halliburton. I understand that the New Yorker’s offering this week is a part of the forthcoming novel, Absurdistan. Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and now lives in New York. In addition to his earlier novels, a non-fiction piece by him had appeared in the Granta special issue on America.

Gary Shteyngart

Just when you thought you were safe from tenured radicals, Russell Jacoby has returned. To proclaim his interest once again in flushing other tenured radicals down the drain. Here he is in the Nation (hat-tip to Vijay Prashad) fulminating against Eric Lott’s new book, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual:

There is nothing wrong–indeed, there is everything right–with English professors like Lott appraising, criticizing and savaging the work of other professors and writers, but there is everything wrong about doing it in the name of a righteous revolution that consists of unreadable articles in New Literary History. Lott serves trays of holier-than-thou academic leftism with extra helpings of causes and clotted language. To revive an old label, Lott’s work smacks of “infantile leftism,” but when Lenin used the term he was referring to new political parties, not professorial posturing.

I must say I’m now interested in checking out Lott’s book, just to find out whether Jacoby has quoted only the most stringently theoretical lines. I say this because I have heard Lott speak on quite a few occasions, and he was also a contributor to one of the books I edited, and I can think of very few who can match the wit and eviscerating guile of his formulations. I also believe, by the way, that Bob Dylan got the title of his 2001 album from Eric Lott’s previous book, Love and Theft. Let’s also remember that Jacoby is precisely the target of Lott’s criticism, and his own anti-theoretical rantings had become pretty familiar by, say, 1990. Still, I liked reading his review-essay. All I’m saying is that there’s a limit to how much you can enjoy, even when moved by sixties nostalgia, the act of licking stale vomit.

P.S. Louis Proyect has a thoughtful critique, which I have just read, of Jacoby’s tired but also bad-faith leftism. [P.S. posted on March 26, 2006, PM]

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