Here’s a nugget about Chinese capitalism. A businessman is selling World Cup air in China.

With no official license as of now, the company has given four bags of the “auspicious air” to some football fans as present, the report said. “I will be giving out another 12 bags, on first come first serve basis,” Li was quoted as saying.

He has received 25 plastic bags full of “World Cup air”, which he intends to sell for 50 yuan ($ 6.25) each.

The bags are approximately 3 centimetres by 9 centimetres in size. Unfortunately, the air in four of the bags leaked out during the journey from Germany to China, Li said.

More here. Via Amit Varma. Hot-air photo from here.

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Via Manish Vij, who uses each of his eight arms, nearly every Indian’s birthright, to make wonderful postings at this site.

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Or like hyenas, cougars, and yes, baboons. Read on.

Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

It always pleases me enormously–given the fact that I earn my livelihood by doing what I do in the classroom–that everything in the end turns out to be a matter of correct pedagogy.

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I was talking to Randy Martin about books to teach about politics and art, especially because I’m teaching a course next semester on war, and Randy suggested I check out this site and their book, A Brief History of Outrage. This book is the work of the visual-art/activism collective THINK AGAIN.

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Time Out Mumbai is now available online. There is no excuse any longer for your not knowing what is happening in the maximum city. Time Out Mumbai is easily among the best Indian magazines, although very few none of the others attend so well to a city’s varied pasts or its present. It is edited by my dear friend suavacito Naresh Fernandes who, along with Jerry Pinto, edited Bombay, Meri Jaan.

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A friend of mine received the following email over the weekend, and I forwarded it to Freddy Deknatel who asks whether there’s a poetential here for a sequel to “Three Kings.” (Freddy has been doing an excellent job presenting documents from Iraq on his blog–covering soliders’ experiences not only from the contemporary conflict but also from the beginning of the last century.) The email is purportedly from a soldier in the U.S. army but it promises a scam that will go further than what the Nigerians were able to do–or, perhaps as likely, this is a new turn in the career of the Nigerian email scam-artists:

From: “Capt.Brown Hugh”
Subject: PLEASE CONTACT ME

Please I am Captain Brown Smith of the US Marine currently serving in Iraq.

On Monday 19 June, 2006 we received an urgent call from northern Baghdad that some terrorist group camped there. Consequestly, my battallion were sent there to forestall their activities.

Sensing our presence, they opened fire on us.We returned fire on them,after which some of them were caught.After intense torture,they took us to Karbala near Baghdad.On reaching there they took us to a deserted building where they kept their weapons. Atfer intense search one of them took us to one of the rooms .

In the room were three metal boxes. I opened them to my amazement, they were loaded with the US dollars. I was dumbfounded, I asked one of them he told me that they were into illegal crude oil sales and also that they do receive financial support from other islamic fundamentalist groups.

On return to our base, I hid the metal boxes in my personal room as the squardon commandant. At night of the same day, I
counted the money it amounted to $7.6 million USD in $100 denomination.

Now, I need a reliable person to send this money to, please give me your name, contact address,phone number and bank account number so that I can send the money if you are interested. You have 30%, while I have the rest. I will come down there immediately you receive it. I will even reign from my job.

Above all, try to keep this information secret and confidential Don’t disclose it to anybody for security reasons and to protect my job with the US Marine. Please contact me with this email address:captbrownhugh@yahoo.com.

Yours sincerely,
Captain Brown Hugh .

The photo above is from Freddy’s website. Charlie Company, First Marine Battalion, Eighth Regiment, Fallujah, December 2004. Photograph by Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times

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Dinesh never became a famous writer, but he did become a writer, and he published several novels. I translated one of these from the original Hindi into English and tried to get it published here, but I was told that the background was too unfamiliar to be of interest to an American audience. Of course, it was very familiar to me; I had actually lived in New Delhi and was not only a witness to the principal events but a part of them.

A simple opening paragraph but effectively introducing the conceit of a life and the story based on it. This is from “Innocence,” a short-story by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, published in a recent New Yorker. The conceit works because this account of a life, as well as its purported borrowings from fiction, is itself deceptively accomplished. Jhabvala’s story succeeds in its portrayal of character and even the relationships between the people who populate its pages; however, it fails in its presentation of plot, principally in its approach to the gold-smuggling case or the resulting scandal, because there is little understanding or even engagement with the public sphere, with what are sometimes called outside forces. In this sense, the disappointing climax, with its filmi murder scene, represents the lowest point. However, here is a more successful example of a scene that might be described as existing outside the domain of enclosed, private lives:

Dinesh got her hired in the English section of All India Radio. She became the disk jockey for a request program called “Yours, with Love,” playing recent pop songs from England and America that had been selected by listeners with messages for their loved ones. She read these messages in a seductive voice—“This is for Bunny, and a million billion thanks, darling, for the fabulous times”—which made Sahib nod and smile in some sort of recognition, while Bibiji looked down shyly, as if she were the one being addressed.

P.S. Will someone advise the New Yorker to find better illustrations for the stories they publish about India? Jhabvala’s story comes accompanied by a sepia-tinted photo that seems to have been borrowed from a colonial harem. Hello? For a story that details a near-contemporary, metropolitan middle-class life? Some weeks ago, there was a story in the New Yorker by Jhumpa Lahiri, and again, for some mysterious reason, the photo accompanying it showed a part of a woman’s body, clad in a churidar-kurta, clasping in her hands what the photographer no doubt imagined was a pot full of steaming dal.

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An interview with the most excellent James Wood appears in the pages of the Kenyon Review. The interviewer Jesse Matz picks out all the questions that ought to be asked of Wood, and what makes the interview particularly interesting is that it is conducted in front of a college audience. It is this latter aspect that is responsible, I think, for the things that get said about “the critical scene at its very best” and “how to write, edit, teach, and read–all in the service of the books themselves.” Wood observations always shimmer with a bright energy, and he never fails to be engaging, even when he is a bit off the mark, as when he presents academic critics as relentless defenders of the canon. The interviewer asks Wood a great question toward the end about what the role of the contemporary novel–”is there anything that today you think the novel is for, specifically?–and the reply makes me wonder whether it doesn’t also hold the kernel of a more elaborate argument that can be made about why the literary, when thought about in slightly more serious terms than most creative writing programs allow, trumps the greater, more abstract, ambitions of theory:

One of the phrases I’m very fond of is the famous one that comes in Henry James’ letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, where he defends essentially his idea of what the modern novel can do against his idea of the limitations of the historical novel. The phrase he comes up with is this compound phrase “the present palpable intimate.” I think it’s still something which I hold fast to. Present, because obviously, the novel needs to be set in the contemporary world, has its traffic with the contemporary. Palpable, because it’s full of concreteness and density and all the rest. And the intimate, above all for me, the intimate, which I don’t think needs to be limited to the domestic. That’s the mistake that perhaps an experimentalist might assume, that “The intimate must mean only domestic settings.” But, the expiration of the “present palpable intimate” along with what I would call, what you might call a sort of “circularity” of the novel form. I mean by that that we’re surrounded by discourses that are very efficient at analyzing a contemporary sign world, the world of the spectacle.

That’s been one of the enormous benefits, it seems to me, of the last thirty-forty years. What the novel can do, you might define it in circular terms: it justifies itself by making an inquiry which only it can do. It doesn’t need to, I think, be infused with, and this is one of the things I don’t like about Franzen, for instance. I don’t think it needs to borrow the language, the languages of theory or cultural studies. It will make its own formal justification. So I would, yeah, I think there’s a limitless amount that the novel can do, especially in this world almost entirely dominated by film, especially by the rapid editing of film, the one-and-a-half minute scene and so on.

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WASHINGTON, DC—A team of leading historians and psychiatrists issued a report Wednesday claiming that the United States was likely the victim of abuse by its founding fathers and motherland when it was a young colony.

More.

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PHOTOGRAPHS © MONIKA FISCHER/MATHIAS BRASCHLER

My friend Andy Tepper writes in Vanity Fair:

Has there ever been a greater stage for athletic heroics than the World Cup? Has there ever been a more improbable game face than the one worn by Ronaldinho [above], the wizard-like Brazilian midfielder who exudes an impish glee with every backheel, pirouette, and sleight-of-foot he performs? Then again, he’s Brazilian (did I mention that yet?)—and soccer, for him, is less a battle of wills than a fantasy, an artful dance meant to bewitch defenders. But just take a look at some of the other faces of this year’s standout performers—slack-jawed, grim, wide-eyed, and anxious, taken moments after recent matches—and you can begin to feel the tension and sweat of “the beautiful game.” (Though David Beckham, admittedly, remains as stylish as ever.) VF.com gathers these portraits of 15 international stars from the new book Faces of Football (Art Books International), by Monika Fischer and Mathias Braschler, as World Cup 2006 kicks into high gear.

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