Two Thousand Eleanor Rigbys in Small Town Ohio

“It seemed to her that between herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that must be quite open and understandable to others.”

--Sherwood Anderson

In Sherwood Anderson's novel, Winesburg, Ohio, Alice Hindman, an unmarried 27-year-old living with her widowed mother and working at a dry goods store, is leading a lonely life. It has been ten years since she “gave” herself to Ned Currie, who'd gone to the “city” for work, promising to return for her one day. He never came back and his letters had tapered off a long time before. She knows he's not returning for her, but does not know how to move on, to get along with others: “If I am not careful I will grow unaccustomed to being with people.” She dwells on her alienation until one night she can't take it anymore and rushes into the yard during a thunderstorm. She is naked and in a “wild, desperate mood,” she yells to a passing farmhand. When he stops she hides in the bushes and then flees into her room. Weeping at her careless mistaking of foolhardiness for courage, she begins to “force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.”

Alice is not the protagonist of Winesburg, Ohio-- she is just one of its lonely citizens. The book is and is not a novel, closer to a collection of short stories, each “concerning” a different character, all more or less unified around the poignancy of distinct alienation. Nearly all these troubled persons are tangentially connected to George Willard, whose parents run the town's inn. George is a nineteen year old reporter for the Winesburg Eagle, the local gazette. The townsfolk confide in him, though some loathe George, since he has some get-up-and-go, that he does not seem so disconnected as they are, and might even emigrate from Winesburg to the city.

George dreams of being a writer. A schoolteacher, Kate Swift, more moll than marm and the object of local gossip, a woman who once lived in New York and had even traveled to Europe, tells George not to dwell on “mere words,” that if he is to write well, “the thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.” In Winesburg, almost no one says exactly what they mean. They live quiet lives, punctured by a significant, usually detrimental outburst catalyzed by a breaking point when loneliness has become too unbearable. Alice, the character mentioned earlier, is physically unremarkable, her “shoulders were a little stooped and her hair and eyes brown,” but this belies her swarming emotions: “She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on.”

“Death,” George mutters, out for a walk, “night, the sea, fear, loveliness.” George is finally grasping Kate Swift's admonition-- that these aren't mere words, but poignant feelings everyone endures, the words themselves just sounds signifying a much bigger picture. He has this epiphany on a clear night in a destitute neighborhood of ramshackle claptraps. George needs to share this euphoria with a woman, Belle Carpenter, but his sense of glorious inevitability is ruined when he is humiliated by her beau. Passing the same neighborhood on his way home the laborers' houses now appeared “utterly squalid and commonplace.”

Sherwood Anderson

In spite of the unpretentious, utterly Midwestern prose style, Winesburg, Ohio is not light reading. It's a sad book about sad souls and though it concerns a rural small town published nearly a hundred years ago (in 1919), the book feels extraordinarily relevant; it seems then that the old folks are right, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The reader is reminded of his own coming of age experiences, how it seemed no one understood him, how he never imagined he would be able to break through his adolescent rut into something more profound and occasionally meaningful. In George, I saw a bit of myself, as I was, compensating for an inarticulate nature, when George tells Helen White, the best girl in town, “I'm going to be a big man, the biggest that ever lived here in Winesburg.”

George's cocky disclosure comes in the penultimate story, “Sophistication.” His “big man” speech is remembered by George on the evening of the town fair. Helen is visiting from college and is being escorted by a pompous university instructor whom she finds exasperating. At this point, George has decided to leave Winesburg, and wants a moment with Helen. His mother has recently died, partially from an unfulfilled life, and he no longer feels so entitled with destiny; he has become “sophisticated,” learning that “he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.” Helen does manage to escape her date and when she and George find each other they share a nearly wordless, magically compatible night at the top of the fairgrounds after the blithe villagers have gone home to their farms, the hum of parties on Main Street drifting to them from town. Going downhill, they have a childish moment where breaking into a trot, George slips and Helen laughs at his fall. Their comfort in each other's presence fortifies the both of them for the divergent roads they will both take upon leaving Winesburg: “Man or boy, woman or girl, they had for a moment taken hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the modern world possible.”

Such a sentiment richly deserving to all of us, so obvious and yet so elusive, has rarely been so gorgeously put down in words. Here is literature in its truest, most fundamental form, an indispensable reminder that we are not alone. And George does leave Winesburg. In the last story, “Departure,” he is off to a big city, worrying about being taken for a greenhorn by cityslickers. He imagines he should be contemplating big ideas on such a momentous occasion. Instead he ruminates over little things, everyday moments in Winesburg life, "Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter, hurrying through the streets on a summer evening... Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelop." George drifts into sleep running through these sundry details. When he stirs, his hometown “had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.” Such is the journey that so many of us have to make. Hopefully, we can make something out of the adventure, or at the very least, find a storytelling language that gilts our best efforts.

Story of a Captain Called Cook

In the year 2014 we take geography for granted. For the right amount of money, Mt. Everest can be attempted, kayaking around the collapsing icebergs of Anartctica is a possibility, and any place in the world, no matter how remote, is a few hundred miles away from the nearest airport. Hard to appreciate then the courage of explorers who risked their lives to map out the unknown reaches of our planet. When you left port on a ship, farewelling land, you were truly saying goodbye to life as you knew it, conveniences, friends, your loved ones, for perhaps years on end. The world was put together in piecemeal-- kingdoms hoarding resources and knowledge of shoals and beneficial winds often published false maps to deter foreign explorers from safely accessing these “discovered” lands. Thus proper understanding of the earth's dimensions was a slipshod process that took centuries. For context, it wasn't another 250 years after Magellan's crew first circumnavigated the globe that Australia's existence was confirmed.

A by-his-bootstraps lad from rural Yorkshire didn't discover the Australian continent (that was a Dutchman named Abel Tasman), but he was the first one to visit and map its eastern coast, one of many achievements in a legendary career. Before reading Richard Hough's biography Captain James Cook, I long imagined the famed explorer as an intrepid British pirate in the vein of Sir Walter Raleigh. But his life story is one of sobriety, competence, steadfastness, loyalty, ingenuity, leadership and, most especially, level-headedness.

Born into a family of impoverished laborers, Cook did not even see the ocean until he was seventeen years old (a bit of a late bloomer). By sheer hard work, good sense, and careful ambition, Cook rose from a sailor on local shipping lanes to working with the Royal Navy surveying the St. Lawrence River, distinguishing himself as a cartographer in the Seven Years War. He knew the right contacts in the government and they trusted him enough on a major voyage to the southern seas.

Cook sailed more nautical miles than any man in history-- visiting nearly every far-off fairy tale tropical port you've ever heard of and many you haen't, spending considerable time in Tahiti, New Zealand, as well as being the first explorer in the Antarctic Sea. His greatest contribution to cartography was proving conclusively what did not exist, that is a great southern landmass (beyond Australia in tropical or sub-tropical latitudes) and a Northwest Passage between the Bering Sea and the Atlantic Ocean (which entailed much fruitless sailing in bad weather in very cold climates).

These were long trips where it was unlikely to replenish food and water resources. The greatest threat to sailors in the explorations prior to Cook was scurvy, a lack of Vitamin C caused by a restricted diet. Cook was the first explorer to discover corollaries between nutritional habits and good health. As much as his surveying added to human knowledge, it was his advocation of sensible dieting for sailors that was just as strong as a legacy to the annals of exploration (but it wasn't easy getting sailors to put down their daily dose of saurkraut).

Unlike so many explorers who had an us-and-them attitude to indigenous tribes, Cook did not refer to the native peoples he encountered as savages but as human beings. From the Inuits in Alaska to the Polynesians of Tahiti to the naked Fuegians in the Magellan Strait, Cook showed restraint, when so many in his line of work slaughtered, captured, and indentured natives under some ludicrous proselytizing aegis.

In spite of all his years at sea, beyond a few minor islands in the remote Pacific, his only famous discovery was the Hawaiian Islands, which is where Cook met his end. This was his third voyage and he was evidently exhausted and possibly ailing with some stomach virus that affected his judgment, as well as his temper. Like the Aztec mythology predicting the arrival of a white-skinned god, so did a legend in Hawaii's Kealakekua Bay predict a deity coming in a great ship to the shores of the local tribe. Cook's visit was propitious at first, but evolved into chaos, leading to violent skirmishes between Cook's men and the islanders. Cook himself was torn to pieces and it was only through careful negotiations with the local priests were they able to recover most of his bodily remnants.

The last moments of Captain Cook

The catastrophe and Cook's demise in Hawaii is gripping narrative, especially as I was coming into the story for the first time knowing little of Cook's heroics. The writing comes to life, whereas in most of the biography, Hough's prose is as sober as his subject. (Cook mostly abstained from excess, and while his men took native paramours, Cook took on a moralizing posture to these dalliances-- sailors going AWOL to lead a Gaughinian existence in Tropical Paradise were flogged ten times for their improprieties.) Nevertheless one likes and cares about Cook and sees the tragedy in his premature passing in ways the vicarious explorer could never sympathize with Columbus and Magellan, who are more famous, when they should be just infamous. But this is hardly an exception; the prism through which popular history reflects deeds done doesn't have a sensible filtering system. 

Journey to the End of the Night

“Reader, fuck you!”

--William T. Vollman,

in the afterword to the novel

I'd high hopes for Celine's Journey to the End of the Night. All the cool cats had read Celine long ago (the coolest of them in the original French) and Henry Miller had it on his list of personal faves. And for the first two-hundred pages I was right there with Celine's misanthropic misadventures-- in fact, reading the novel I could not help but think that Henry Miller would not have existed without Celine-- here was an anti-hero, Ferdinand Bardamu, who was as funny, horny, and charismatic as Miller's starving artists. The free-flowing prose, the dirty old man vibe, the profane nuance, this was proto-Miller, which does not diminish Tropic of Cancer in my eye-- in fact, it elevates his work, as if Miller stole a page from Celine's dirty canvas and made it actually likable. If your protagonist is going to be an absolute dick, then it's best if he is at least someone worth breaking bread with. To be honest, I am too much of an optimist and I don't quite hate myself enough to love Celine's most famous novel.

But what a start. Celine's surrogate “hero,” Bardamu, a ne'er-do-well with no career prospects or money is swept along early 20^th century France in a tide of social upheaval. An infantryman in World War I and horrified by the idea of being cannon fodder, Bardamu attempts desertion, then fakes lunacy to escape the trenches. Released from the asylum, he winds up on a boat to the Congo in colonial Africa, where everyone is drunk and disorderly and where he is stationed alone in the bush with nearly nothing to live on. He escapes this scenario as well and winds up on a ship to America where he is hungry in New York and later, after a brief tenure on Ford Motor Car's assembly lines, finds the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold to sugar mommy his habits until the need to move on seizes him again. The changing scenery, often capricious and episodic, is nevertheless exciting, and Bardamu reminds the reader of a latter-day Job or Candide, though Bardamu is never under the Panglossian impression this is the best of all possible worlds. All he wants to do is get laid and have a little food in his belly and a place to sleep. Self-preservation is the priority. Fraternal brotherhood or such utopian “flapdoodle” never enters his febrile mind: “Each man for himself, the earth for us all.”

Though this is not necessarily a most sympathetic sentiment, Bardamu is just likable enough, and Celine's portrayal of mankind's hypocritical foolishness compensates for the narrative leaps, until we skip five years ahead and Bardamu is a penurious doctor. The remainder of the novel takes place in France, and lacks the propulsion of the first half-- what was a philosophical adventure has evolved into a bitter misanthropic tirade against life itself and it goes on for at least a hundred pages too long. Bardamu is an unrelenting head case of negativity. There are no “genuine realizations of our deepest character except war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.” No one can nail one-liners about the futility of living quite like Celine.

The titular “end of the night” is death (and I don't need to tell you there is any sort of glorious afterlife to be expected in Celine/Bardamu's world view), and everything before that is suffering. As William T. Vollman paraphrases Celine in the novel's afterword, this void might be a relief for creatures that are “no more than decaying, flatulent assemblages of phlegm and fecal matter, animated by lechery and self-delusion to commit acts of increasingly futile denial of the grisly fact that existence is spoiled.” This adequately summarizes the characters's motives and world views. If you're not cool passing a long novel reminded of the meaninglessness of your existence and your indignation only exemplifies what a presumptuous asshole you really are, Celine might not be the right author for you at the moment. Myself, I've flirted with nihilism, but never courted her. I'm only glad that I managed to finish the book with most of my idealism intact.

A Year in Reading (2013)

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."

--Lemony Snickett

“Reading!” those busy zip-zipping multi-taskers cry superciliously, “who has the time these days anyway?” And to be fair, I find the pleasure of reading more often a luxury than a responsibility. But it is not just in a human being's prerogative to challenge himself with reading, it is in our collective social interest. Through reading not only do we acquire smarts but we also become a better, more compassionate, empathetic species. There is a historical argument gaining momentum which suggests that the rise of the novel and the belief in the universal rights of man could very well be interconnected.

Here are the books I read in 2013 in sequential order. They are marked with their year of publication. Those with a * details a second (or multiple read) and those with a <> designate a book read while traveling.

1. High-Rise by J.G. Ballard (1975)
   
2. East West by Salmon Rushdie (1994)
   
3. The Birdman and the Lap Dancer by Eric Hansen (2004)
   
4. Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara (1934) *
   
5. Karma Cola by Gita Mehta (1979) * <>
   
6. Maximum City by Suketu Mehta (2004) <>
   
7. Delhi: a Novel by Khushwant Singh (1990) <>
   
8. Kubla Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China by John Man (2006) <>
   
9. A River Sutra by Gita Mehta (1993) <>
   
10. Bill Contino's Blues by James Ellroy (1994) <>
    
11. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (1938)
    
12. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (1965)
    
13. The Boy with the Thorn in His Side by Keith Fleming (2000)
    
14. The Road to Wellville by TC Boyle (1993)
    
15. Quiet Days in Clichy by Henry Miller (1956) *
    
16. The White Nile by Alan Moorehead *(1960)
    
17. Howard's End by E. M. Forster (1910)
    
18. Loving by Henry Green (1945)
    
19. 1984 by George Orwell (1948) *
    
20. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) *
    
21. Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain (2007) *
    
22. Welcome to the Monkeyhouse by Kurt Vonnegut (1970)
    
23. Hip: a History by John Leland (2004) <>
    
24. In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami (1997) * <>
    
25. The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander (2007) <>
    
26. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912) * <>
    
27. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1988) <>
    
28. What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank by Nathan Englander (2012) <>
    
29. Double Indemnity by James Cain (1935) <>
    
30. Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis (2010) <>
    
31. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007) <>
    
32. The Reader by Bernard Schlink (1995) <>
    
33. The Art of Travel by Alain de Bottom (2002) <>
    
34. Motoring with Mohammed by Eric Hanson (1991)
    
35. Cultural Amnesia by Clive James (2007)
    
36. The Assault by Harry Mulisch (1982)
    
37. The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (1957)
    
38. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949) * <>
    
39. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954) <>
    
40. Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (1887)
    
41. The Spice Trade by John Keay (2005) *
    
42. The Magic of Blood by Dagoberto Gilb (1993)
    
43. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (1928)

All in all I managed to read 43 books this year (last year I'd read 42-- it seems that thus my pace is one book every nine days or so). 25 of the books were novels, 7 were short story collections, and 11 were books of nonfiction, including memoir, history or travel narrative. Also 11 of the books were rereads, and 19 were read "traveling," which included a stint at my mother's for three weeks with all the time in the world. The oldest book read was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) and the most recent Nathan Englander's What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank (2012). 18 of the books were published before I was born. 21 of the books were written by Americans. Of the others, only three were translations. All books were hard- or softcover-- I am yet to read anything on the tablet. 

It was wonderful to discover Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, Harry Mulisch's The Assault, and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I revisited some of my favorite books this year including Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, Ben Fountains Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, and the historical narratives of John Keay's The Spice Trade and Alan Moorehead's wonderful The White Nile. There were no absolutely bad reads, though I found myself slightly exasperated at times with Khushwant Singh's Delhi, Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and John Leland's trying too hard on the prose vernacular of Hip: a History.

As this blog has been slightly moribund of late, I will make some attempt to summarize the books I'm reading-- I say that now but following through on resolutions-- especially those related to writing-- is not one of my strong suits. Nevertheless, it's important to try. The first book I'm reading in 2014 is Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, and after a promising start I rather loathe it.

How was your year in reading?

A Year at the Movies

Carol Reed's The Third Man

Unfortunately, I don't really prioritize cinema-- it's very rare that the movie I watch is the last thing I do before sleep. If too comfortable I don't make it through the film (it took three sittings to make it through Brewster McCloud).  It might seem then that I watch movies in order to relax-- that is partly true, but that doesn't mean that I don't love movies-- I'm just getting to the point where they are a luxury of time and I am getting older.

That said, I did blow my share of hours on TV series including multiple seasons of Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, Californication, and Homeland. I don't consider these hours lost-- as interesting as real life might be it's important to lose ourselves in something larger than life, albeit in vicarious thrills of fictitious plots. Today's Breaking Bad was yesterday's serialized Dickens' novel. Between the two, I'll take Walter White over Oliver Twist, at the end of the day, anyway.

Following are the films watched in 2013. Those marked with an * signify a multiple viewing, an & means watched on the road, and $ means a visit to the movie theater:


January/February
Gimme Shelter (1970) *
Oceans 11  (2001) * &
Rocky 3 (1983) * &
Top Gun (1986) * &
Commando (1985) * &

March/April
Crossfire Hurricane (2012)
Searching for Sugarman (2011) *
Stomping Ground  (1972)
Wanderlust (2011) * &
Flight (2012) $ &
Closer (2002) * &
Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1968) *

May/June

...

July/August
The Last Movie (1970)
The Great Gatsby (2013) $
Duel (1971) *
Religulous (2007)
The Bank Dick (1940) *
My Man Godfrey (1936) *
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
The Running Man (1987) *
Paper Moon (1972)
0Dark30 (2012)
In the Year of the Pig  (1968)
Underground (1976)
Sans Soliel (1982)
World War Z (2013) $
Before Midnight (2013) &
The Bling Ring (2013) &
Sideways (2003) * &

September/October
The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) &
The Killing Fields (1983) * &
Stardust Memories  (1980) * &
Spring Breakers (2013) &
The Limey  (1999) * &
Guilt Trip (2013) &
Django Unchained (2013) &
Before Sunrise  (1995) * &
A Scanner Darkly (2006) &
Now You See Me (2013) &
Walkabout  (1971) &
Wild Strawberries  (1957) * &
Empire of the Sun (1987) &
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) * &
Elysium  (2013) $ &
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) &
No (2013) &
Dr. Strangelove (1964) * &
March of the Penguins (2005) &
The Internship (2013) &
The Wickermen (1973)

November/December
Brewster McCloud (1971) &
Cries and Whispers  (1972)
Gravity (2013) $
200 Motels (1971)
Blank City (2011) *
The Third Man (1949) *

There are 56 films on the list.  23 were multiple viewings, and five of them were watched on the big screen where movies are designed to be watched. Five were documentaries, five were foreign language films, and interestingly, seven were related to music.

Of the films watched on the road (outside home), there were 31. To better quantify that, 23 of them were watched at a stretch staying at mother's for three weeks this summer (seven of those 22 watched on transoceanic flights). Obviously, there were stretches where I was too busy to watch much of anything, particularly last spring.

I loved discovering Gravity, Sans Soliel, and Cries and Whispers. It was a joy to revisit The Third Man, Smiles of a Summer Night, and Gimme Shelter. I loathed Django Unchained, 0Dark30, and Baz Luhrman's The Great Gatsby for various reasons. And I still have no idea what to make of Frank Zappa's 200 Motels.

Comments, debate, subjectivity welcome!

No Tortured Conscience: The Dubious Patriotism of Zero Dark Thirty

In August, 1945, news of the dropping of nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was greeted by Americans with much singing and dancing in the streets. Tens of thousands of innocent people had been obliterated, hundreds of thousands more would have lifetime health complications, and the photos from the home front reflect unrestrained ebullience. In that very summer, my grandfather, having survived the European theater of war, was being redeployed to the Pacific. For him the dropping of the atomic bomb came as a tremendous relief. He warned me not to judge the macabre enthusiasm of celebrants. War was over, obviously at a tremendous physical cost, but the spiritual one, at least to me (born after the fact, true) seemed much harder to qualify.

I thought of that Times Square jubilation when a team of Navy SEALS executed Osama Bin Laden in the spring of 2011. There was the same moral ground compromised-- the US launched a military operation within a sovereign nation, murdering an unarmed man in his pajamas and several others without any kind of due process whatsoever-- leading to a similar burst of spontaneous ecstasy on the streets. Like nearly every American, I loathed Bin Laden, but that didn't mean I didn't think apprehending and trying him in a court of justice was the better tactic, not just on a legal standpoint, but a morally strategic one. And unlike the twin specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his execution did not mean any kind of victory on the war on terror. Fundamentally, so long as our military occupies civilizations hostile to our presence and drone strikes rain death from the skies, there will always be an enemy. Bin Laden had been just a man, a symbolic and very famous one, yes, but not the soul of our boogyman.

For these reasons, I found Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty morally repugnant, not only because it lies to us-- intelligence gleaned from torture did not figure in the locating of Bin Laden's hideout-- but because it seems to condone not only "enhanced interrogation" but American impunity as well. No other country in the world would dream of sending in a special forces unit to assassinate another nation's citizens. Were Pakistani assassins to be airdropped over Dick Cheney's bunker, murdering the old man in his bed with televised masses cheering his execution afterwards, Americans, no matter their low opinion of the former VP would be appropriately disgusted. But this is exactly how US foreign policy manages its agenda-- it can do so because of a crisis of imagination in the American people.

If you read the newspapers not much is needed to describe the plot of Zero Dark Thirty. It begins with distressed audio from 9/11, segueing immediately to a CIA black site where a man is being tortured for information. Immediately then, we know where Bigelow stands on the Hammurabi Code. The scenes are necessarily brutal and any American who believes we should be above such nefarious interrogation methods will feel ashamed. But waterboarding, induced sleeplessness, and sexual humiliation give CIA agent Maya Lambert (Jessica Chastain) a lead. The good news is this leads to bin Laden. The bad news is this a lie: Bigelow prefaces her movie declaring the story is "based on actual events," then goes out of her way to endorse the necessary evil of torture with false claims. Even normally reptilian politicians like Diane Feinstein have taken issue with this fictionalization of reality. Acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, has called bullshit on Bigelow and her screenwriter, Mark Boal.

Film critics, whose professions require them to suffer one banal blockbuster after another, have mostly praised the film, particularly its "taut" structure and climatic ending. That we already know what happens and that a crew of trained killers shooting an unarmed man in his bed is not exactly climatic is besides the point. There are moments when art veers dangerously into propaganda so that social critic Naomi Wolf's  comparison of Kathryn Bigelow to Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl is apt: "Like Riefenstahl, you are a great artist. But now you will be remembered forever as torture's handmaiden." Overlooking the politics of a politically motivated film is not just absurd but irresponsible. Alas, Zero Dark Thirty, thrilling and competent as it might be, will not age well in a progressive future.

Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and hundreds, if not thousands of other villains are dead. Not to mention tens of thousands of innocent people as a result of destabilization due to our meddling in the region, to say nothing of our own moral compromises with torture, spying, and murder. It would be a true constitutional crisis if more of us cared-- instead we see the jubilance of the crowd fist-pumping our culture of vigilante politics. Zero Dark Thirty is a work of nationalist polemics beholden to the status quo, a state of affairs far removed from core American values. That it was commercially and critically successful, in spite of the efforts of a vocal minority, is immensely disappointing.

Nevertheless I'm holding out, hoping that the tide will turn, not from without, but from within. Martin Luther King said the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Bigelow's heroes are Navy SEALS, but there is probably not a few young talented filmmakers who see something noble in the efforts of someone like Edward Snowden, who is the very definition of a patriot, a man that risks everything, his reputation and his life, because he has high standards for his country and seems to understand the language of the Constitution better than our President. We don't know yet the outcome of this story, but hope that this narrative, once told, involves heroism, nary tragedy.

What Pals Do in Their Down Time

Shemp Howard (LARGE)

My friend, Rob, and I have lately got into the habit of addressing and signing various monikers in our correspondence. For instance, I will write an email, beginning "Dear Kevin," and following the body of text, sign off as "Mr. Costner," or something like that. It's rather pointless and there's no existential meaning to these name games, but then there's no reason either to discuss the top musicians of a given name (e.g. "Mick(ey)" in declining significance: Mick Jagger, Mick Jones, Mick Taylor, Mickey Dolenz, Mickey Moonlight), but we do that too.
        Between us, of course, much inner life has been put on the table, tales of love and loss, of best days and worst failures, talking through disasters until perspective is achieved and so is the realization that things will turn out all right in the end. Nevertheless, being friends is not just about sorting through the deeper issues of being alive, but of the smaller ones as well. There are potentially decent banalities, peculiar ones that only certain kindred spirits can parse.
         In this photograph, the scab on his right shoulder is a burn mark. The day before, sometime after midnight, we'd gone block sprinting to see who was fastest, but he'd been smoking a cigarette while high-stepping and paid for it.  It was more than a year ago-- I can't say for sure but I'm pretty sure I won that brief contest. As for Rob, I never asked him specifically, but maybe occasionally glancing in the mirror he recognizes the faint outline of the consequential scar, remembering it had been arguably detrimental sprinting with a lit cigarette, but hell, worth it.      

Channel Surfing with Ganesh

What's On TV?

(the photo, LARGE)

There has been a lot of press regarding India's spectacular growth since economic trade was liberalized in the early 1990s. However, outside certain urban enclaves, much of the country remains extraordinarily undeveloped. Mostly, it is a matter of bureaucratic corruption, rather than a failure of civic resourcefulness. Though in America it is now common for every room in the house to have a flat screen TV (not to mention computer, tablet, and cellular entertainment), a television remains a luxury item for the average Indian. If the traveler should happen upon a festival, a fair, or large trading market, it is not uncommon to see a large TV hooked up to enormous, outdated speakers, blaring Hindustani epics like The Ramayana on pirated DVDs to an audience of farmers and pastoralists, who, living on the land mostly as their ancestors have done for centuries, still regard the television as a magical box.
          TV is seen by many (including myself) as a cultural id, generally reflecting national predilections.   Museums elaborate on a nation's past; television showcases the culture's present infatuations. Mostly, whether you're in Italy, Japan, or wherever, this is not a good sign, since most programming is beyond terrible. No anomaly, Indian TV has its share of faults. There might be a hundred channels on cable, but most of them feature spiritual swamis, religious reenactments, cricket matches or recaps, melodramatic soaps, and sturm und drang news programs regarding Pakistan.
          I don't come to India to watch TV, but in recent years I've appreciated it as an instrument for decompression. Engaging with Indian everyday life, navigating its crowded, polluted streets, maneuvering through conversations with endless strangers, takes its toll on the traveler. Like many who come here, I am seeking betterment-- not exactly enlightenment or even an epiphany, but some kind of transformation-- one cannot visit India without returning home with more human empathy and gratitude for the small, good things in life. Nevertheless, there comes times, really long days, where I can no longer write in my journal or make sense of the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. The television then allows me a short respite. The average Indian wealthy enough to own a television might be anglophone, but among the dozens of channels, usually only HBO and STAR have English language programming. And so last time out, I ended up watching Rocky III, Commando, and Top Gun, three 1980s movies I loved as a kid. I'm more amused by this than embarrassed. Thus, although when it comes to TV I'm more of a detractor than advocate, for all its many faults, it has helped me through the long night.

Lakeside Dawdling

Pushkar Lake

(the photo LARGE)

Pushkar is a provincial town in central Rajasthan, a half-hour bus ride north of the depot at Ajmer.  As far as inland Indian cities go it is comparatively quiet and beautiful, as the town borders the north shore of a lake and the eastern and western points are crowned by temple hills, dedicated to the Creator God Brahma's wives, Savitri and Gaytri. The lake is holy, and pilgrims, mostly villagers from the Hindu Belt of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar, are daily bused in for worship. A lot of hippies continue to make the journey, young and old, and the tea shops and juice stalls being diminutive and crowded, the traveler often winds up in digressive conversation, in which life story details are divulged.
            Not feeling well when I arrived in India in February earlier this year, I'd come straight to Pushkar to convalesce for a few days. It was my fourth time in the town-- I'd spent a few weeks here on several occasions five years before researching and writing a novel set in India. I was creating a path for my characters, and then spending time on it. A lot of that time found me by the lake, which is not just one of my favorite places in India, but in all the world.
            The first thing one must accomplish, if one wants to spend considerable time by the water, is a session of puja with a priest. Doing so, gets you a "Pushkar passport," a saffron-colored string the priest ties around your wrist to let the others know you're respecting the old ways. When I'd first come to Pushkar, I'd been annoyed by this aggressive stance, for after all, I was not a Hindu, and had no need of the ceremony. But now I've come to appreciate the ritual, and make some effort to find the right priest, one that doesn't care so much about my rupees as much as he might concern himself with my spirit and the well being of my family (the chanting involves naming the members of one's intimates).
           When I leave Pushkar, I don't take the string off my wrist. It reminds me of sitting and wandering by the lake, pigeons figure-eighting in the sky, shrieking children running along the ghats, hippies beating drums at sunset, the smell of ganja wafting in the air, itinerant musicians playing village ballads on heirloom fiddles, thoughtful solitude and improvised companionship, and most of all, the invaluable feeling that while the world might be in the throes of one catastrophe after another, the days in Pushkar have been fine.
           
       

Two Suits

Lately, I've been dealing with the dilemma of identity. What this means is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to work as both a writer and photographer, not because I have a preference for one or the other, but due to the rationing of time. The occasional assignment aside, neither endeavor pays very well and success-- never quite so based on superficial metrics of popularity and earnings-- is usually qualified by my personal satisfaction, that such and such story and photo is perhaps uniquely mine. Nevertheless, I find that lately I have less capacity to devote myself to both disciplines. This means making hard choices and the purging of some indulgences. However, between writing and shooting, I don't know if it will ever be possible to choose one over the other.
            Failing that, and because, lately, taking pictures comes more naturally to me than the complex process of constructing either a story's narrative or an essay's thrust, I'm feeling that the best compromise is to put them together. I've already been doing this for several years with my haiku project, but minimalist poetry is one thing, digressive thoughts inspired by a moment in time, another.
            In March, my wife had a birthday and one of the presents I bought for her was a photobook from Danny Lyon called "Memories of Myself." Lyon is probably most famous for riding with and photographing Midwestern biker gangs in the sixties, but this photobook is a collection of images from different times of his life-- the bikers, of course, but also crossdressers in Galveston, Texas, a lover in Knoxville, revolution in Haiti, and prostitutes in Columbia, among others. The photos, already beautiful, had deeper resonance with some context. Lyon once said, "The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble."
           In the spirit of inspiration, I will try to do the same with my photography here, not exactly saying what a photo is about, but lingering on what the moment meant to me. Not a caption, per se, but a loose elaboration.
           Because most of us don't fit into one suit, but many, or in my case, two.