The good folks at SAJA draw attention to this Benetton ad in which the color of the bruises matches that of the sweater (which, in turn, matches the color of money). Here, again thanks to SAJA, is a list of organizations that provide help against domestic violence. Also see this.

benetton-domestic-violence-SAJA-SAKHI

Who said Republicans are incapable of constructive thinking?

“I would like to suggest…that maybe we give Paul Wolfowitz a new job and send him over [to Iraq] as mayor since the neocons got us in over there.”
Rep. WALTER JONES (R-N.C.), following Wolfowitz’s resignation as president of the World Bank

TIME Magazine

The discussion around Shonali Bose’s film “Amu” reminded me of Amitav Ghosh’s remarkable essay “The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi” which begins:

Nowhere else in the world did the year 1984 fulfill its apocalyptic portents as it did in India. Separatist violence in the Punjab, the military attack on the great Sikh temple of Amritsar; the assassination of the Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi; riots in several cities; the gas disaster in Bhopal - the events followed relentlessly on each other. There were days in 1984 when it took courage to open the New Delhi papers in the morning.

shonali-bose-amu-amitav-ghosh

Siddhartha Deb explains something crucial about Lydia Davis’s fiction:

Sometimes, a title can be nearly as long as the story, as in “Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans,” whose entire text reads: “Gainsville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!” We could almost text-message it, but then we wouldn’t get the effect of the surrounding white space, against which the words seem to suggest an almost gnomic quality. We might miss the exclamation marks, the italics, the iambic pentameter; we might miss the insight that we’re missing something.

More

P.S. May I add that the book’s beautiful cover does a fine job of offering an explanation too? Language is not transparent, like glass, but opaque, etc. etc.

siddhartha-deb-lydia-davis

Summer has started. No school any more.

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A poem by Mahmoud Darwish in a recent New Yorker; the image above is a Banksy trompe-l’oeil painting on a security fence in the West Bank.

Remainder of a Life
by Mahmoud Darwish May 14, 2007

If I were told:
By evening you will die,
so what will you do until then?
I would look at my wristwatch,
I’d drink a glass of juice,
bite an apple,
contemplate at length an ant that has found its food,
then look at my wristwatch.
There’d be time left to shave my beard
and dive in a bath, obsess:
“There must be an adornment for writing,
so let it be a blue garment.”
I’d sit until noon alive at my desk
but wouldn’t see the trace of color in the words,
white, white, white . . .
I’d prepare my last lunch,
pour wine in two glasses: one for me
and one for the one who will come without appointment,
then I’d take a nap between two dreams.
But my snoring would wake me . . .
so I’d look at my wristwatch:
and there’d be time left for reading.
I’d read a chapter in Dante and half of a mu’allaqah
and see how my life goes from me
to the others, but I wouldn’t ask who
would fill what’s missing in it.
That’s it, then?
That’s it, that’s it.
Then what?
Then I’d comb my hair and throw away the poem . . .
this poem, in the trash,
and put on the latest fashion in Italian shirts,
parade myself in an entourage of Spanish violins,
and walk to the grave!

(Translated, from the Arabic, by Fady Joudah.)

mahmoud-darwish-new-yorker-banksy-west-bank

Is the FBI interested in you? Make your life an open book. Offer by-the-minute self-surveillance!

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he’s keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we’re drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone’s touchscreen. “OK! It’s uploading now,” says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. “It’ll go public in a few seconds.” Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you’ll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi’s site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both.

More

(Thanks, Robin Khundkar)

hasan-elahi-wired-tracking-transience

Christopher Hitchens asks in Vanity Fair : “How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?”

The question isn’t answered in the article. Nor do we get to learn anything at all about why young Brits with more melanin in their skin than Hitchens find it easy to respond to the abominable views of the fundamentalist imam of Finsbury Park. Hitchens finds the easy way out by citing the anti-fundamentalist views of two brown writers, both of whom we like a great deal, Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali. We hear something about the limits of British multiculturalism, and sure, it has to be blamed for the ways in which it has pandered to extremists of all faiths. But such a strain of multiculturalism is a part of the system of racist practice, not an exception to it, and the same can be said of fundamentalism too, united at birth with the racist system it purportedly opposes. There is a strong whiff of racism in the Hitchens piece; it would appear that anything that is resistant to assimilation merits being banished from the West. But my main objection to the article is its remarkable blindness to the way in which brown or black youth are automatically seen as outlaws. Because, sadly, religion is the modality in which race is lived, I’d like to recommend to Hitchens recent films like “Bradford Riots” and “The Road to Guantanamo.” (And, by the way, is Hitchens the only person on this planet to want fish and chips over seekh kebab or that particularly British-Asian concoction called chicken-tikka-masala?)

(Via Arts and Letters Daily)

christopher-hitchens-finsbury-park

Zarina Bhimji

“Howling Like Dogs, I Swallowed Solid Air” (From “Love 1998-2006″)
2003, Transparency in light box

P.S. I am very much looking forward to Bhimji’s “Out of Blue,” last recommended to me by Okwui Enwezor.

I watched yesterday Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others.” One of the main reasons I wanted to see the film was the following paragraph from Anthony Lane’s eloquent review:

One of the marvels of Ulrich Mühe’s performance—in its seething stillness, its quality not just of self-denial but of self-haunting—is that he never distills Wiesler into a creature purely of his times. You can imagine him, with his close-cropped hair, as a young Lutheran in the wildfire of the early Reformation, or as a lost soul finding a new cause in the Berlin of 1933. See him crouched in a loft above Dreyman’s home with a typewriter, a tape deck, and headphones clamped to his skull. Watch the nothingness on his face as he taps out his report on the couple’s actions: “Presumably have intercourse.” How long can you listen to love being made? Especially when your only love comes from a hooker who marches in, performs, then leaves before you have even refastened your pants? Slowly, the tables turn. Wiesler steals Dreyman’s copy of Brecht and takes it home to read; he starts to omit details in his official account; and, for some fathomless reason—guilt, curiosity, longing—he lets the lives of others run their course.

If you’re even half a writer, wouldn’t you want to believe that writing can set us free? The film was absorbing. But it turned out to be more convincing in the moments when it tried to present terror (the opening lecture by Stasi man, for example) than when it sought to inspire hope (the closing moments when interceptor of mail has become a simple mailman and an accidental reader). And today, thanks to Robin Varghese, I found an article by Slavoj Zizek about the film, provocatively arguing that the real plot of the film is a homosexual romance. Maybe. I found more resonant this passage from the Zizek text:

To put it quite brutally, while Ostalgie is widely practiced in today’s Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi nostalgia: “Good Bye Hitler” instead of “Good Bye Lenin.” Doesn’t this bear witness to the fact that we are still aware of the emancipatory potential in Communism, which, distorted and thwarted as it was, was thoroughly missing in Fascism? The quasi-metaphysical epiphany toward the film’s end (when the mother, on her first walk outside the apartment, finds herself face-to-face with a Lenin-statue carried by the helicopter, whose outstretched hand seems to address her directly) is thus to be taken more seriously than it may appear.