Michael Dirda was speaking at Vassar this evening. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. When he started working at the Post, Dirda had various literary heroes but he didn’t want to meet them, fearing that if he became friends with a writer he couldn’t be fair in his reviewing. (He had a colleague get his books signed by the writers he liked–Hunter Thompson inscribed a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with the words “For Mike Dirda. Thanks for getting me crack cocaine in Boston–Your friend Hunter Thompson.”) Dirda said that he has long held that “there wasn’t any point in reviewing books I didn’t like.” He had no interest in writing “hard-hitting critical pieces.” He just wants people to read good books, and he performs the task of recommending them. I understood him when he said that he believes, like Auden, that writing nasty pieces was bad for your character, but I thought he was pitching rather low when he said “the real essence of reviewing is description.” Surely you serve your readers better when you present readings that go beyond description, that startle you into a different consciousness of the work–and the world?

And then, as if to challenge what he had been saying, Dirda said that he had of course written some negative pieces. When he reviewed Judith Krantz’s “terrible book” Dazzle, Dirda recalled writing: “I read most of ‘Dazzle’ in one sitting. I had to. I wasn’t sure I could face picking it up again.” He had ended the review with the words: “Enough. Sometimes reviewers lament that good trees have been felled to produce a book. In this case, I even feel bad about the ink and glue.”

Go here for more of such pronouncements as well as generous praise.

P.S. For a splendid story that puts its finger on the 7000-volt wire that connects the writer and the critic, go here to listen to T.C. Boyle reading Toby Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.” The story, only a few hundred words long, is a masterpiece, with a very clever structure. What it recovers is the critic’s love of language that brought him to literature. It is very fine, and only after a while, also within the fold of memory, that the reader realizes that it is also a way of earning the critic’s surrender.

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A people’s doctor is put behind bars by the state in India. Click here for the Tehelka story on Dr Binayak Sen. The jailed man says, “You must understand, there is a Malthusian process of exclusion going on in the country. You cannot create two categories of human beings. Everybody must wake up to this, otherwise soon it will be too late.”

To understand the full horror of Binayak Sen’s case — to get a grip on its significance for the sanity of this country at large — one needs to take a close look at the state of Chhattisgarh. The story of Binayak is just the most high-profile example of hundreds of unnamed individuals like him, caught in the cross-hair of a State at war with its own people. Like theirs, his story is the story of suspended reason, suspended logic and suspended freedom that is the inevitable outcome of a State that paralyses itself with the scare of “national security.”

(Hat-tip, Shivmeet)

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“Archive Fever–Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” is the name of a thoughtful, critical exhibition at the International Center of Photography in NYC. The exhibition brings into the foreground a new engagement with the “archive”–not as a place where old documents lie awaiting discovery but as an active critical practice pondering the ways in which images are put together and acquire historical meaning. It makes for a wide-ranging and highly stimulating collection of works, all of them introduced with stylish, incisive ease by the curator Okwui Enwezor.

Here is a review of the exhibit by the ever-reliable Holland Cotter.

I was struck again and again by the ways in which artists with quite contrasting styles have been so preoccupied with the manner in which iconic images as well as more obscure records shape and become a part of our collective memory–and I was especially grateful that the curator’s eloquent readings of these works, assembled in this manner for the first time, deftly outlined the differences between them. Zoe Leonard’s parody of the archive being quite distinct from Glenn Ligon’s no less brilliant orchestration of dialogue around Mapplethorpe’s images; or Harun Farocki’s presentation of the videograms from the Romanian revolution presenting media critique in a manner quite separate from Anri Sala’s recovery of a video-interview tape from his mother’s militant past, its words recovered with the help of lip-reading conducted by deaf-mutes; or Eyal Sivan’s re-editing of the Eichmann trial tapes from Fazal Sheikh’s immensely impressive project of bringing together images and words from Afghanistan’s brutalized past. Highly recommended!

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“A Moment of Hope” in TIME magazine by Mohsin Hamid

It has been some time since I was as happy as I was on the night afterPakistan’s Feb. 18 general election. Mine was perhaps a reckless joy, temporarily distracting me from the very real troubles that Pakistan faces. But as I spoke to friends and acquaintances, both here in London and in my hometown of Lahore, I realized that the sense of euphoria Iwas feeling was widespread.

Pakistan is sometimes described by the international media as the most dangerous place on the planet. That has always seemed to me to be an irresponsible exaggeration: there are other countries whose citizens are far more likely to die of violent causes. But certainly Pakistan is a troubled land, suffering from illiteracy, poverty, terrorism and the bite of rapidly increasing prices, especially of food. The Feb. 18 election has not solved those problems. Yet Pakistanis are justified in allowing themselves a sigh of relief. Indeed, the entire world should be breathing a little easier now, for Pakistan suddenly looks a lot less frightening than it did.

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From an article in the Chronicle:

They found that in a variety of ways, conservative students were less interested than liberals in subject matter that often leads to doctoral degrees, and less interested in doing the kinds of things that professors spend their time doing.

For example, liberal students reported valuing intellectual freedom, creativity, and the chance to write original work and make a theoretical contribution to science. They outnumbered conservative students two to one in the humanities and social sciences — which are among the fields most likely to produce interest in doctoral study. Conservative students, however, put more value on personal achievement and orderliness, and on practical professions, like accounting and computer science, that could earn them lots of money.

Achal Prabhala writes that “the ideal South Indian Brahmin achieves his perfect body not by lifting weights or cutting carbs, but by acquiring vast reserves of inner power. He is soft, not taut; lean, but never muscular. Most crucially, he understands that the greatest glory is renunciation, that the best-lived life is a life hardly lived at all.” Here’s more from Prabhala’s hilarious essay “The Road to Wellville” in Bidoun:

Days begin at about 4:30am with bhajans piped into each room on closed-circuit audio. At 5:30, after the mandatory walk around the grounds and the mandatory laughing session, we begin the kriyas, a set of cleansing techniques to quicken the kundalini. First up is vaman dhauti, which translates ominously to “cleansing of the middle through penance.” Patients sit around in a circle and drink warm saline water until they puke. (The first time I faced vaman dhauti, I hesitated, fidgeting nervously with my glass. The instructor laughed. “This is not tea,” he chided, forcing my head back and pouring the brine down my throat. Moments later I was lurching and vomiting like everyone else.)

More kriyas follow, “cleansing of the throat” and “cleansing of the eyes.” The latter turns out to be quite a tender experience, like being kissed on the eyelids by tiny droplets of warm water.

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Via Paper Cuts

“I lost my son to a war I oppose. We were both doing our duty,” wrote Andrew J. Bacevich in the Washington Post last year.

Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

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(Thanks, Rev. Joe Nevins)

Thanks to Romola Sanyal and Renu Desai, organizers of the Cities and Citizenship symposium at UC-Berkeley, I spent Valentine’s Day in sun-drenched California. My keynote talk was titled “Dispatches from Dark Places,” a report on impoverished towns and also conditions in a prison-state, but, as far as I was concerned, key notes were struck earlier in the day by Jim Holston, author of Insurgent Citizenship, and Paola Bacchetta, well-known for her work on right-wing women. Very good to see again Scott Saul, Gautam Premnath, and the very excellent Rich Mordenti Simpson.

It may be in English: but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave.
— Kamau Brathwaite

Please check out the latest Politics and Culture–a special issue that I’ve put together on “Rotten English.” The contributors are:

Mandakini Dubey on the Trooth of Defiance
Dohra Ahmad on Rotten English
David Golumbia on Evelyn Ch’ien
Evelyn Ch’ien on Weird English
Phil Wegner on World Bank Literature
Rashmi Varma on the Cultural Turn

If the good people out there could post this information on the postcolonial and cultural studies listservs, I’d appreciate that very much. Many thanks.

P.S. Here is Amardeep’s take on this issue.

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I’m recently back from a wonderful visit to Buffalo and, while clearing my desk of accumulated materials, found the January 17 issue of the New York Review of Books–in which I took great pleasure in reading Ian Buruma’s tribute to Berlin Alexanderplatz , Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel as well as the film that Rainer Werner Fassbinder made from the book. Here, however, is Buruma’s tribute to the metropolis that lies behind those works:

Döblin has often been compared to Joyce, and Ulysses is sometimes cited as his model. Döblin always denied this, however. He wrote:

“Why should I imitate anybody? The living language I hear around me is enough, and my past gives me all the material I need.”

But he read Joyce after he had begun writing Berlin Alexanderplatz, and said that the Irishman’s work had “put the wind in my sails.”[3] In fact, both writers, living in the age of Freud and Jung, were attempting to do something similar, to break down the barriers between conscious behavior and subconscious drives by delving into the churning magma of their heroes’ chaotic inner lives.

But it is not just the human characters whose consciousness, or subconsciousness, is opened up for the reader, but the metropolis itself. Berlin Alexanderplatz is constructed as a collage of often random images that flicker into view, as though one were clattering through the teeming streets on an electric trolley, taking in advertising slogans, newspaper headlines, popular songs, bars, restaurants, hotels, neon signs, department stores, pawnshops, flophouses, cops, striking workers, whores, subway stations, and so on. Again, Fassbinder put this very well:

“More interesting than the question of whether Döblin was acquainted with “Ulysses” [is] the idea that the language in “Berlin Alexanderplatz” was influenced by the rhythm of the S-Bahn trains that kept rolling past Alfred Döblin’s study.”

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