Books Life Blog tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2009-01-17:/mayas_blog//1 2011-05-18T21:36:48Z Movable Type 5.04 Nameless, but not a stereotype tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.246 2011-05-18T10:48:54Z 2011-05-18T21:36:48Z A New York Times article drew a comparison between Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the connection prompted reflection on media treatment of women and girls who allege rape.As Jeffrey Toobin reported in his 2009 New Yorker piece about Polanski,... Maya
A New York Times article drew a comparison between Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the connection prompted reflection on media treatment of women and girls who allege rape.

As Jeffrey Toobin reported in his 2009 New Yorker piece about Polanski, in 1977, Samantha Gailey - the 13 year-old girl who Polanski raped - was subjected to invasive grand jury questioning about her prior sexual activity and drug use.  Her lawyer was sufficiently concerned about the trauma she would suffer on the witness stand that he advocated for a resolution to the case that would absolve her of testifying.

Thirty-four years later, the woman alleging rape has been - and will continue to be, if the law prevails - afforded a much wider scope of privacy protection.  Her name has not been released in the American press (although it has been in France).  Her face was not exposed to the press when she identified DSK in a line-up at the police station.  And if she gives grand jury testimony, she will not be subject to irrelevant questions about her prior sexual activity.

Nonetheless, although our law has made some strides, our discourse seems to have a way to go still.  Speaking to the press, the woman's lawyer, Jeffrey J. Shapiro, referred to her as "simple," as in "She is a simple housekeeper who was going into a room to clean a room."  Considering that Mr. Shapiro also offered this gem - "Her story is her story, which she has told to everyone who asked her" - legitimate questions arise as to who is simple.

Mr. Shapiro also admitted ignorance about the facts underlying her asylum claim (which was granted despite the stringent interpretations given by U.S. judges to already high standards), and - even more unprofessionally - answered a question about her immigration status by saying he was "unsure," thereby potentially opening his client to a visit from the INS.

I know only the barest outline of this woman: she is 32.  A widow.  She is refugee from Guinea.  She was granted asylum in the U.S.  She has a 15 year-old daughter and a brother who owns a restaurant in Harlem.  She has been employed at the Sofitel in Times Square for 3 years.  She is a Muslim.  She speaks French and English.

Although not mentioned in any media I saw, one reason U.S. courts grant asylum to Guinean women is that they have been subjected to - or fear they or their daughters will be subjected to - female genital mutilation.  Apart from this concern, Guinea is a politically unstable country, overrun with cocaine and violence.  An example: in 2009 security forces controlled by junta leader Moussa Dadis Camara opened fire on protesters, killing many and brutally raping women.

Even this scant information suggests that the woman in the center of the DSK storm is not a "simple housekeeper," but a human being who has weathered intense experiences, a survivor with capacities for adaptation and resiliency, a person who has known pain and grief, a mother, a believer - in short, a woman entitled to dignity, respect and the assumption of individual complexity that we enjoy about ourselves and that we extend to others for whom we care.

Regardless of the outcome of the legal inquiry into her accusation, whether the law vindicates or castigates her, she is not Aunt Jemima.  If our discourse cannot capture her more accurately, the stereotype will not be her, but us: racists.

(Image of Jeffrey J. Shapiro from his website)
]]> IMF, international aid: screwed tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.245 2011-05-18T08:58:19Z 2011-05-18T10:23:52Z Maya Dominique Strauss-Kahn is an economist, not a lawyer, but I nonetheless feel that he would have done well to have held himself to the lawyer's standard of avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. 

Without weighing in on his guilt or innocence, I feel compelled to condemn the apparent impropriety in which he engaged.  I do not refer merely to the sexual assault charge, but more broadly to the situation of the head of the IMF being accused of coercing sex from a Guinean refugee granted asylum in the U.S. and working as a hotel housekeeper.  The symbolism is unmistakable: the IMF rapes Africa.

Regardless of the outcome of the legal inquiry now underway, DSK has sunk the credibility of his organization and its mission.  The IMF is now an organization that overpays horny white men so they can fly first class and wear $7,000 suits and, when they get out of those suits, rape hard-working, devout, socially-disadvantaged people of color. 

And by extension, the same applies to the World Bank, the UN or, for that matter, USAID.  They are no different.

One's opinion of the IMF (or any of the other foregoing named institutions) - whether for good or for ill - is no matter.  The IMF is a public institution, and one that exerts control over much of the global economy and its wealth.  As such, the ethics of its institutional behavior, and the actions of its representatives, must be impeccable.  Public institutions owe the public guarantees that their operations are ethical; otherwise they are illegitimate and have no claim to public funds. 

To have betrayed this obligation to the public so flamboyantly and vulgarly is unforgivable.  No verdict of innocence can expunge this breach.  Whatever else DSK may have done, he has set back the cause of international development.

(Image of DSK from The Telegraph)
]]> Happiness is not all tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.244 2011-05-17T14:18:12Z 2011-05-17T15:10:41Z Maya It's not every day that one's psychological analysis extracted from Hamlet finds confirmation in The New York Times.  But today appears to be that day.

Having blogged about how the paralysis Hamlet suffers because of his existential and epistemological crisis parallels my experience in the face of unyielding rejection and failure, I then read in the Times that

when animals or people were given a series of arbitrary punishments or rewards, they stopped trying to do anything constructive.  "We found that even when good things occurred that weren't earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people's well-being," [Dr. Martin Seligman] said. "It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive."
I can relate.  My experience of the world is that, regardless of my merit, effort or desert, luck - that is to say, arbitrariness - is the deciding factor in my accomplishments, both personal and professional. 

Because, as Dr. Seligman says, "accomplishment [separate from happiness] is a human desiderata in itself," my situation is not conducive to satisfaction:

"'Well-being cannot exist just in your own head,' [Dr. Seligman] writes. 'Well-being is a combination of [happiness] as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.'"
Accomplishment must not, therefore, always be based on luck; but achieving this happy state requires a certain redefining of "accomplishment."  For example, as a well-intentioned friend said to me of my novels, I finished them - never mind that they're unpublished and no one reads them.  My friend isn't the only one to employ this technique: in Hamlet, the Danish prince makes "readiness" his accomplishment: "the readiness is all."  The rest?  "The rest is silence."  

This coping mechanism may provide some solace, but the larger relief comes in the recognition that the paralysis is not madness: it's normal.  Well being requires certain objective external conditions that, when absent, sabotage one's enjoyment of life.

That's what the doctor says.  And, I suppose, anticipating that advice through recourse to Hamlet might be considered some sort of accomplishment.
   
(Image of Dr. Martin Seligman from Princeton Alumni Weekly)
]]> The readiness is all tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.243 2011-05-16T10:52:11Z 2011-05-16T13:16:41Z Maya
Seven months ago, I saw the (British) National Theatre's production of Hamlet in London, and it was brilliant.  The director, Nicholas Hynter, dropped the royal house of Denmark into the security apparatus of modern governments.  In addition to imbuing the play with the excitement and suspense of a political thriller, this present-day setting made the power dynamics of the play come violently alive.   

In keeping with the modernity of the production, Peter Holland - writing in the program's playbill - offered an interpretation of Hamlet's dilemma that seems tailored to today's psycho-analyzed, cosmopolitan, post-deconstructionist, alienated audience:

[Hamlet] approaches a paralysis of will that is the consequence of an impasse reached by his thinking: the more he is able to grasp his awareness of how he knows anything the less it seems possible to know anything at all.  The process of knowing makes all truth only relative . . . . Confronted with the enormity of that crisis of truth, the only response is to "Let be," to accept the impossibilities of being human and the limits of knowing and to wait patiently for whatever comes.
The quote to which Holland refers comes at the end of the play, when Horatio is exhorting Hamlet to listen to himself and decline to fight Laertes: "If your mind dislike any thing, obey it."  Hamlet responds by dismissing his feeling of foreboding, saying - in essence - we're all going to die and we don't know when, so what does it matter if it's soon?  "The readiness is all . . . Let be."

I don't know if Shakespeare ever ran a marathon.  I doubt it.

Nor do I have any insight as to whether Peter Holland ever ran a marathon, but he has a goatee, so I think it's unlikely.

Nonetheless, both men seem intimately familiar with the modern marathoner's mindset.  After months of single-minded physical labor, abstinence from late nights, booze and any semblance of vice, the marathoner surrenders to reality: the preparation is all you can do; after that, as my brother says, "anything can happen in a marathon."

In fact, the "anything" that happened to my brother during last Sunday's marathon in Prague, was a pretty damned impressive "anything."  He ran 3:15:57, which is not the kind of fate one can complain about.  Had my brother gone off to fight Laertes, the play would have had a different ending.

Not so with me.  My legs all but shattered, and I staggered across the finish line 5 hours, 9 minutes, and 54 seconds after I started.  I never ran slower in my life.  Indeed, during training, I ran 22 and 23 miles in roughly four hours; but the race was nothing like training: blisters on my toes, leg muscle cramps, and an extended stretch of walking were all present during the race and noticeably absent during training.  Had I been tapped to duel with Laertes, death would have arrived on the playwright's schedule.

While I've had enough exposure to truly rotten fates to refrain from describing mine as one about which I can complain, my situation is nonetheless dispiriting - all the more so because, from the outset, I saw running the marathon as a metaphor for how I live my life, a microcosm that reveals the whole.  I became attracted to this idea last year, when I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and discovered that the key to reaching the peak was going slow and surrendering to the limitations imposed by the environment.  I blogged about the inspiration I drew from my mountain experience to persevere in my writing.

Unfortunately, the take-away here is less upbeat.  Months of planning and work, tireless effort, deprivation of socializing and fun, dieting, forswearing alcohol, money spent on clothes, shoes and supplements - not to mention all the acupuncturists, physiotherapists, chiropractors and masseuses who toiled to get my legs race-ready - resulted in a completely disastrous performance.  Enthusiasm, willpower, investment of resources: all easily come to nothing.

I thought I'd already learned this truism the hard way.  Six years of work, discipline and sacrifice to write novels have yielded (a) four novels on the shelf, as of yet unpublished and unread, and (b) a state of near bankruptcy.  Rejection is the only constant, and my life is so unstable that I've come to feel for rejection a wry and perverted gratitude: it's the only thing I can rely on. 

It also make me want to vomit.  Not just vomit, but curl up in a ball on the curb and stay there.  When your rock is rejection, maybe you're better off under the stone.

Of course, I'm not the first to feel this way.  I refer to the aforementioned "paralysis of will that is the consequence of an impasse reached" when "the more [I am] able to grasp [an] awareness of how [I] know[] anything the less it seems possible to know anything at all.  The process of knowing makes all truth only relative" - although I add, no less painful for being relative.  "[T]he only response is to 'Let be,' to accept the impossibilities of being human and the limits of knowing and to wait patiently for whatever comes."

While I'm constitutionally constrained from waiting patiently - the best I can muster is waiting in a state of thinly-veiled neurosis and sincerely-felt misery - I take the larger point.  "The readiness is all" because it's all we can control.  The loss of control reduces us to paralysis - metaphorically, literally or, if we're really unlucky, both.  Though being without control is an aspect of reality, living in that reality without being sabotaged by it requires a mental discipline of preferring, and prioritizing, what you can control.

That's our choice: lopsided or frozen.

And here, at last, is the metaphor I'll draw: even a lopsided runner (like myself, suffering from a biomechanical breakdown in her right leg) can finish a marathon.

(Images of Maya Alexandri and Talmon Alexandri running the Prague marathon on 8 May 2011 compiled by Maya Alexandri)
]]> Bad stories about a bad man don't explain great art tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.242 2011-04-20T07:36:35Z 2011-05-02T09:51:39Z Great artists are so frequently assholes that I have learned to compartmentalize. Ok, so Lord Byron was loathsome in his relations with women; doesn't stop me from admiring his work unstintingly.Whether such compartmentalization is difficult to maintain or distasteful -... Maya
Great artists are so frequently assholes that I have learned to compartmentalize. Ok, so Lord Byron was loathsome in his relations with women; doesn't stop me from admiring his work unstintingly.

Whether such compartmentalization is difficult to maintain or distasteful - probably a bit of both - it's not a popular approach.  People prefer judgments.  There's a pleasing equanimity in being able to say, for example, that because Picasso hated women, Cubism amounted to a visual violence against women - cutting up the planes of their faces and bodies and rearranging them - and that our assessment of Picasso's achievement should be accordingly tempered.  In a world where bad produces bad, we find stability.

Such a world is not the one in which we find ourselves. 

As a result, many people require a certain amount of creative narrative to rationalize situations in which bad produces good.  Maurice Malingue is one such person.

Malingue was the editor of Paul Gaugin's letters to Mette Gad, his wife, and others.  Working in the middle of the last century, Malingue attempted to reconcile aspects of Gauguin's life that were in some tension: on the one hand, he was a genius painter; on the other hand, he was an asshole. 

The facts supporting Paul Gaugin's categorization as an "asshole" are as follows:  After fathering five children, he quit his job, lived apart from his family and contributed little to his family's support or upkeep.  He was openly unfaithful to his wife.  He did not return home either when his favorite daughter, Aline, or his favorite son, Clovis, died, both in their early twenties.  That Gauguin had syphilis, apparently of the variety that leads to madness, is something of a mitigating factor, though he seems to have contracted it after he set himself on the path of abandoning his family.

What Malingue made of these facts is laugh-out-loud funny to today's reader, who is at least 150 years too removed from the Romantics to be reflexively sympathetic to Gauguin's choices.  Malingue has no such scruples.  With a zeal unknown to generation acclimated to a divorce rate of roughly 50%, Malingue - in the Preface to Letters to his Wife and Friends - attacks Gauguin's wife, Mette Gad, and condemns her for expecting Gauguin to support his family:

[Gauguin's] letters constitute the most . . . overwhelming indictments in the trial of Mette Gauguin, who can now be charged with incomprehension of the artist, indifference towards the man, and with having as a wife failed the father of her five children.
. . . .
Mette, in contrast with wives of innumerable artists, found it difficult to contemplate poverty for herself and her children.
. . . .
It is probable that Mette, the daughter of an official, brought up with some degree of mental freedom but in the observance of somewhat rigid moral principles, never could understand how a father of five children could throw up a comfortable position without bothering what was to become of his family. 
Of Gauguin's abandonment of his children, Malingue remarks:

[Gauguin] is a father who suffered keenly in living apart from his children.  Obviously, he could have had them with him if he wanted to.  He renounced his paternal duties deliberately, because constrained to do so by the demands of his art.  The presence of his children would have imposed on him paternal obligations.
As for Gauguin's infidelity, Malingue takes a (dare I suggest typically French?) brazen line:

[Gauguin] plunged into casual amours at Pont-Aven, set up house in Paris with a Javanese, and in Tahiti bedevilled hussies invaded his bed every night.
These "bedevilled hussies" were 14 year-old girls who Gauguin took as his live-in companions.  (In Mario Vargas Llosa's telling - in This Way to Paradise - far from finding his bed "invaded" every night, the aging, broke and syphilitic Gauguin, whose legs were covered with sores, and who lacked money necessary to feed even himself, struggled to find girls willing to live with him.)

Of course, Malingue is full of shit.  Mette might not have been a creative woman, but she was in no way wrong (or even "rigid" in her morals) to expect financial support from her husband and the father of her many children.  Caring for five children might be inconvenient for Paul Gauguin, but the existence of children - not their presence or absence - imposes parental obligations; abandoning one's children geographically does not absolve a parent of responsibilities, however much one's time needs to be devoted to art.  As for adulterous husbands, at a minimum one can demand that they be discrete and steer clear of minors.

In fairness to Malingue, he lived in a different era, when he was not alone in being relatively receptive to justifying the bad acts of a genius, done in the name of his art.  All the same, Malingue's thinking - in any age - is slavish and lazy, the automatic "yes" of a dazzled fan.

Today, the trend is towards the opposite error, of dismissing Gauguin's mastery because he was an adulterous pedophile and a deadbeat dad.  But such reasoning would be equally slavish (to PC standards) and lazy.

We live in a world in which good can come from bad.  In which - Malingue is almost certainly right - Gauguin could desperately miss his children, and yet do nothing to be with them or help them.  In which Gauguin's actions can be wrong and sick, and still the general public is much the better for them.

The accurate narrative is the critical and rigorous one, the one that describes the world in its ambiguity, and that captures and conjures what beauty there is in such a world as ours.  It's not an easy narrative to tell or to absorb, not a narrative that likely to gain popular currency.  And yet it's the narrative in Gauguin's painting; it's the reason, in fact, that Gauguin is great.

(Image of Paul Gauguin's Self-portrait with the Yellow Christ from the National Gallery of Australia website)
]]> Audiobook recording the hard way tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.240 2011-04-10T10:52:20Z 2011-04-10T11:57:15Z Maya Back in January, I blogged about recording my second novel, The Swing of Beijing, as an audiobook.  I am sorry to say that the experience has taught me several life lessons in the manner through which I most commonly learn: the hard way.

First lesson: location, location, location!  Eureka, California is about as good a place for recording an audiobook as coastal Japan is for a nuclear power plant.  Quite simply, the audio engineer talent isn't in Eureka.  If you want an audio engineer who is incapable of recording the spoken word inside a booth without also recording himself zipping up his hoodie outside the booth - along with picking up other technical noises, like 60-cycle hums, which shouldn't be on the track - then by all means, record in Eureka. 

Second lesson: notwithstanding my default assumption that most people in the world are basically well-intentioned and doing the best they can, the world is occasionally peopled with unprofessional, unethical scoundrels.  Such folk may be disguised as soft-spoken, physically-pathetic, socially-awkward sound engineers to whom one may be predisposed to show kindness.  But for reasons known best to themselves, the mask slips, and they reveal themselves: in my case, the incompetent sound engineer held my master audio file hostage and demanded a ransom of more than a hundred dollars in excess of the hundreds of dollars I'd already paid him . . . for an ultimately unusable recording.    

Third lesson:  people who deserve to be sued don't have to be sued by you.  I didn't pay the ransom, but I did retain a lawyer.  And another sound engineer.  The lawyer sent a demand letter, which threatened to sue the first sound engineer if he didn't return the master audio file to me.  The second sound engineer meanwhile analyzed some mp3 files made from the master audio file, a process that revealed that the master was hopelessly flawed and useless. 

Thus, when the first sound engineer responded to the demand letter by refusing to return the master audio file, I found myself without much reason to pursue litigation.  I could ask for a refund, yes, and punitive damages, as well; but the impetus for the suit had never been money: the audio recording was my voice, my novel, my creation - and I wanted it back.  If it was, in fact, unusable, then I wasn't much interested in being the instrument of punishment for the Eureka-based, unprofessional, unethical sound engineer: let adult-onset diabetes, or some other lifestyle disease related to his obesity and general decrepitude, finish him off.

Fourth lesson:  the fact that I paid $1,150 to two sound engineers and an attorney and ended up with nothing isn't the kind of fact that I should dwell on.  Financial loss is an unavoidable fact of life, especially for artists, and apparently for me in particular, and acceptance is the only manner of dealing that isn't going to impair my quality of life (to say nothing of my emotional calm).  Instead, I will focus on this soothing, amusing quote from E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, in which Aziz says:

If money goes, money comes.  If money stays, death comes.  Did you ever hear that useful Urdu proverb?  Probably not, for I have just invented it.  
The Swing of Beijing will be available as an audiobook at some future, but as-of-yet undetermined, date.

(Photo of Alice Forney personifying the Goddess of Frustration in Relation to Sound Recordings by Maya Alexandri)
]]> Adventures in ba guan tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.238 2011-04-01T02:20:20Z 2011-05-19T12:08:31Z Maya
"Do you fear pain?"

The woman asking me this questions was a cute, young migrant worker named Nana.  She was wearing a white lab coat,  and standing - with a lit firebrand in one hand and a glass cup in the other - in the cramped back room of a hair salon.  I, meanwhile, was lying in my underwear on a massage table, my hair easily within combustion proximity of the flame.

"No," I replied, figuring that amusement was the only reasonable response.  Nana looked confused, but after muttering how most clients were scared of pain, she proceeded with the treatment.

For the record, getting ba guan (usually called "cupping" in English) had not been my idea.  Rather, a Chinese friend at the gym had recommended it.  I'd been explaining how I was trying to lose ten pounds before a marathon (lighter is faster), and she told me that her ba guan practitioner guaranteed ten pounds of weight loss in a month.  She added that she had purchased a series of treatment that she wasn't going to use, and that I could take her sessions for free.

Thanking her and open to trying - well, just about anything - I thus found myself in the aforementioned posture, flesh exposed to fire. 

The fire was not mere theatrics.  Ba guan practitioners insert the firebrand into the cup to suck the oxygen from the space and create a vacuum.  They then apply the cup to flesh, and the vacuum draws blood to the surface of the skin.  (In my experience, the treatment doesn't hurt.)  In theory, the treatment kickstarts one's qi, getting stagnant blood moving and generally supporting enhanced metabolic functioning.

In practice, the cups were falling off my body. 

Nana was becoming increasingly flustered.  "Maybe ba guan is not appropriate for you," she offered.  "Or maybe I'm doing it badly."

"Did you study Chinese medicine?" I asked.

"说实在的,我不好学," she replied.  What she said was ambiguous: it could have meant either that she didn't study at all, or that she had studied, but had done poorly.  Either way, it didn't inspire confidence.

After two sessions, I'd actually gained weight.  "That's not possible," Nana objected.

"It's not a question of possible," I said.  "It happened."

Nana seemed unwilling to accept this distinction.  She wanted me to see her boss, who was a Chinese medicine doctor. 

Dr. Tan was serious, but skeptical.  "Our method shrinks the stomach," she said.  "But you're eating more because your training for a marathon.  Our method won't work."

I assured her that I was eating very little, and Dr. Tan began the treatment.  The cups fell off my body.

"Was it me?" Nana poked her head into the treatment room.

"It wasn't you," Dr. Tan announced.  "Because she [that's me, folks] is a foreigner, she has body hair that prevents the cups from sticking.  Ba guan is not appropriate for her."

I didn't bother protesting that my arms and (shaved) legs were unlikely to pose body hair obstacles to cupping.  Amused acceptance seemed the only reasonable response.

I didn't manage to lose the 10 pounds before I ran the marathon. 

(Image of ba guan treatment from Confucius Institute Online)      
]]> The books ain't helping tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.236 2011-03-31T03:46:34Z 2011-04-05T12:44:06Z Maya I attended law school during tumultuous years when affirmative action was being phased out, and my legal education is indelibly fused with a serious dose of American race-based identity politics.  I accepted the paradigm and my place within it because I believed (and continue to believe that) doing so is morally necessary; the unfairnesses of the alternatives are intolerable. 

Since law school, however, I've lived overseas in environments where American-style race-based identity politics appear absurd.  Racial classifications in China, India and Kenya - where I've spent most of my time since 2004 - exist, of course.  Broadly speaking, such classifications are enormously crude, relatively overt and highly-tolerated by the societies.  Jargon and academic methodologies haven't yet throttled these inequalities: they are facts of life.  If one chooses to engage them, one does so concretely, not conceptually. 

As a result of my experience, I stubbed my reading flow on the following passage in Dan Chiasson's otherwise fine New York Review of Books review of Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois' book, The Anthology of Rap:

Only in hip-hop is the age-old comedy of grown-ups trying to understand young people yoked so uncomfortably to the American tragedy of whites trying and failing to understand blacks. Age incomprehension is comic, since everyone young eventually grows old; race incomprehension is tragic, since nobody knows what it is like to change races.
I'm guessing that, thirteen years ago, when I was in the fishbowl of American race relations, these sentences would have seemed moderate and sensible.  My view now is a bit different. 

What strikes me first is the lack of proportion.  American race relations certainly has its tragic dimensions, most saliently its violence and its capacity for depriving large swathes of humanity of the fundaments of life - including recognition of their humanity.  But whites trying and failing to understand blacks isn't high on the list of "tragic" elements in the American race relations saga.

Next is the lack of precision.  Chiasson begins talking about whites trying to understand blacks, but then recharacterizes the issue as "nobody knows what it is like to change races."  In this shift, problems abound.

First, people do know what changing races feels like: people pass (for instance, Anatole Broyard).

But the larger issue is that achieving understanding across the racial divide and "chang[ing] races" aren't equivalent.  "Chang[ing] races" is not the point: being another race is. 

The question is not one of whether whites can understand blacks, but whether anyone can understand being a different race than the one into which he or she has been born.  In assigning whites an empathetic task without a reciprocal role for blacks, Chiasson assumes a typical, American identity-politics "moral white person" responsibility that manages nonetheless to dehumanize blacks by exempting them from the empathetic tasks inherent in the social contract. 

The obvious situation in which this variety of one-way empathy works is in the animal rights context: we're supposed to feel compassion for the rat in the cancer drug trial, but the rat has no burden of empathy for the cancer patient whose life is saved by the drug.  I'll admit that I have doubts as to whether this paradigm is appropriate for animals; I have no doubt that non-reciprocal empathetic relations are not suitable for humans.  

Once Chiasson's issue is framed in terms of anyone's capacity to understand the racial experience of anyone else, the issue isn't tragic, but universal.  (I doubt that Chiasson would have written, for example, that blacks trying and failing to understand whites is tragic.) 

The problem isn't even particularly American, but one that has arisen between peoples interacting for eons.  Power and wealth imbalances between the groups are better indicators of the extent of eventual understanding that any member of either group will achieve (or not) than are classifications of "white" and "black."  Only unusual people (and never the group as a whole) will deviate from the pattern set by his or her group's demographic profile.

Which brings me to my final observation about the quoted passage: its disconnect from actual interactions between white and black people.  Indeed, Chiasson's next sentence is: "Growing up in Vermont, I met a total of one black person." 

An empathetic attempt grounded in the concrete, rather than the conceptual - and Chiasson goes on to discuss looking up "afro" in the dictionary - seems likely to have yielded a different insight, perhaps this one:  Only in hip-hop is the age-old comedy of grown-ups trying to understand young people yoked so uncomfortably to the reality that too many American whites and blacks are willing to settle for superficial relations defined by commercialism, vulgarity and distanced hyper-conceptualization.     

This abstract compartmentalization of race matters doesn't defend us or protect us from whatever we fear from engaging the issues concretely.  To the contrary, such extreme conceptualization only corrupts our thinking.  Inevitably it implicates books in our dirty work: in this blog post alone, an anthology, a book review and a dictionary have been caught aiding and abetting. 

American race relations may be the only topic as to which I would advocate: Read less.  Engage more.  Don't settle.
 
(Image of Dan Chiasson from Wellesley College website) 
]]> If only "only connect" . . . tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.235 2011-03-31T00:13:58Z 2011-05-17T12:53:16Z In his Express review Wendy Moffat's biography, EM Forster: A New Life, Duncan Fallowell wrote that "the great and beautiful theme of all [Forster's] work [was] 'the search of each person for an honest connection with another human being.'"Certainly Forster's... Maya In his Express review Wendy Moffat's biography, EM Forster: A New Life, Duncan Fallowell wrote that "the great and beautiful theme of all [Forster's] work [was] 'the search of each person for an honest connection with another human being.'"

Certainly Forster's theme is no secret.  Indeed, his formulation of it in Howard's End is endlessly quoted:

Only connect! . . . Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.  Live in fragments no longer.  Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
Although "Only connect" obviously resonates with many people, I prefer Forster's statement of the principal in concrete terms.  Here he is, explaining in A Passage to India, how "only connect" works in action, without any of the abstract "beast" and "monk" references:

There needs must be this evil of brains in India, but woe to him through whom they are increased!  The feeling grew that Mr. Fielding was a disruptive force, and rightly, for ideas are fatal to caste, and he used ideas by that most potent method - interchange.  Neither a missionary nor a student, he was happiest in the give-and-take of a private conversation.  The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of good will plus culture and intelligence - a creed ill-suited to Chandrapore, but [Fielding] had come out too late to lose it.
Forster's description of cross-cultural connection through conversational interchange is something I recognize from experience.  But the more important reason for preferring "good will plus culture and intelligence" to "only connect" is that, in A Passage to India, Forster illustrates something else I know from experience: the limits of his doctrine.

"Only connect" just isn't enough.  Abstractly stated, it's easy to romanticize; contextualized in A Passage to India, it's exposed as wishful thinking.

A brief summary of the plot of A Passage to India is here useful: Fielding and Aziz manage to become friends despite the British raj.  When Adela Quested accuses Aziz of making criminal sexual advances, Fielding maintains Aziz's innocence.  Fielding resigns from the British club in protest of the colonial community's racist presumption of Aziz's guilt.  Adela receives vulgar support from racist colonials, against which her intrinsic decency recoils.  On the witness stand in court, Adela dramatically retracts her accusation.  In the aftermath of the trial, Fielding houses Adela at the school where he teaches, and he urges Aziz not to sue Adela for libel.  Aziz accuses Fielding of helping his [Aziz's] enemy, and years later refuses to see Fielding when he returns to India with his new wife.  Upon learning that Fielding's wife is not Adela Quested, but in fact Stella Moore, the daughter of an elderly woman who Aziz loved and honored, Aziz relents in his anger, but the rupture in their friendship is permanent. 

In the book's last scene, Fielding and Aziz meet, "aware that they could meet no more."  Aziz asserts, "if it's fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then . . . and then . . . you and I shall be friends."  Fielding questions this perspective: "Why can't we be friends now? . . . It's what I want.  It's what you want."  But Forster makes clear that everything in the environs - the horses, "the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion . . . they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.'"     

As even the plot outline clarifies, the connection between Aziz and Fielding does not make manifest "human love at its height."  It reveals that individual human connections devoid of social support are fragile, fleeting and unstable.  The flip-side is shown by Adela Quested, who is propped up by people she loathes: social support devoid of human connections are equally fragile, fleeting and unstable.  Both - as demonstrated by the ostracization of both Fielding and Adela -  lead to loneliness and isolation.

I have lived this saddening dynamic myself.  The vast majority of interactions that I've had over the last seven years have involved some attempt to connect across a cultural divide.  The connections so achieved don't mean what I hope, or wish, or think they mean; they're superficial; they evaporate with a hint of pressure; they continually disappoint.  Falling into the trap of blaming myself - I didn't try hard enough, I didn't have enough compassion - is easy, but the truth is hard.

What EM Forster could have said - what's accurate - is "Only connect, in a context that supports connection."  The drawback to truth, of course, is what Forster describes at the end of A Passage to India: contexts often don't support connections.  The temples, the sky, they don't want it.  And if you're in a context that doesn't support the connection you want or need, then you must remake your context, which is vastly more difficult than making a connection.

To describe Forster's "great and beautiful" theme as finding individual connection with another human being does a disservice to Forster, I think.  In his own life, he knew that what he needed was not an individual connection, but a gay-friendly social context.  And in A Passage to India, he suffused his art with that more complicated version of his theme: "Only connect, although the connection will fail, fragile, fleeting and unstable is our portion."
   
(Image of EM Forster from The Daily Mail)
]]> Recommending Henry tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.232 2011-03-29T23:56:38Z 2011-03-30T01:23:37Z Maya
A friend recently wrote to me asking for recommendations of classic books he could read over Spring Break.  (Plainly, he's not one of my friends who believes that nothing in the classics can rival Girls Gone Wild: Endless Spring Break; and for those of my friends who do hold such beliefs, what about the "lioness on the cheese grater" position referred to in Lysistrata?)

So back to my friend: I replied with a list of books that included Henry James' The Aspern Papers, possibly my fave of the James oeuvre.  Short, shocking and chock full of nasty conflicts of interest and sexual tensions, The Aspern Papers is my idea of reading satisfaction.

Not so much my friend: "I tried reading the Aspern Papers, but didn't really enjoy the writing style."

Poor Henry!  All those long sentences with tangential, intermediary clauses; all that punctuation - those dashes, those commas; all those asides, all that effort, all that style: all beyond the ready appreciation of today's reader.

And poor friend!  Henry James is not called "The Master" for nothing.  All his learning, his intimate knowledge of the human viscera, his understanding of emotional contortion and manipulative behavior, of the corrupting power of money and the dangers of life on society's periphery: all inaccessible under the lock of his impenetrable prose.

The situation brought to mind the scene in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, when Aziz spontaneously recites a poem by Ghalib to an assortment of well-wishers who have come to his bedside when he's sick:

[The poem] had no connection with anything that had gone before, but it came from his heart and spoke to theirs.  They were overwhelmed by its pathos; pathos, they agreed, is the highest quality in art; a poem should touch the hearer with a sense of his own weakness, and should institute some comparison between mankind and flowers.
. . . .
Of the company, only Hamidullah had any comprehension of poetry.  The minds of the others were inferior and rough.  Yet they listened with pleasure, because literature had not been divorced from their civilization.  The police inspector, for instance, did not feel that Aziz had degraded himself by reciting, nor break into the cheery guffaw with which an Englishman averts the infection of beauty.  He just sat with his mind empty, and when his thoughts, which were mainly ignoble, flowed back into it they had a pleasant freshness.
(p. 99-100.)  With humor and a deft description, Forster captured - almost 90 years ago - what we have lost and, still today, haven't been able to replace.  The "infection of beauty" imbues even the ignoble thought with a "pleasant freshness."

Translation: Girls Gone Wild is even better after reading The Aspern Papers!

(Image of John Singer Sargent's portrait of Henry James from State College of Florida website)
]]> Live weight tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.231 2011-03-14T11:42:13Z 2011-03-14T13:00:41Z Maya For about twenty-four hours, from Saturday through mid-day Sunday, I felt leaden.  Productivity on any front was futile: accomplishment was too heavy a goal.  Even sleep was a beyond me; I lay in a thick stupor, conscious, unmoving, dark.  My thoughts grouped in clumps, the manifold forgotten things in the spaces between them. 

I dragged the word "lead" around like a manacle.  The image and sense memory of a lead apron pressed on me.  I wondered at the weight, then appreciated my own summoning of it.  Lead is protection from radiation.

That I could summon the metal without the metaphor!  That I could cast a lead canopy over Japan! 

The pain of the planet's only population to know nuclear fallout on the receiving end of two atomic bombs, now facing the potential meltdown of as many as six nuclear reactors - if that pain were distilled in a cry, what answer could suffice?  My imaginative connection with that pain, my expression of helplessness, was a temporary immobilization, a 24-hour leaden-ization that melted when I became conscious that it was sympathetic: an empathetic burden made manifest.

Though I cannot imagine the depth of pain wrought by the post-earthquake nuclear situation in Japan, I can understand what's necessary to withstand it: resiliency.  Whatever the outcome of the attempts to cool down Japan's overheating reactors, Japan's population needs reservoirs of resiliency.

Realizing this, I thought of Nathaniel Rich's review of Ryu Murakami's novel, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, in which Rich writes that, "grotesque behavior is a logical response to a society [Japan's] that discourages expressions of individuality, self-reflection and personal ambition."  Clucking our tongues at such un-American strains in a foreign culture is easy, but all three of these characteristics - by fragmenting the community, by shifting the focus from the group to the individual - may reduce the overall resiliency of the population and, indeed, of its individual members.

Developing high pain thresholds and resiliency comes at a price; I'm not romantic about the social costs of conformity.  Nor am I soft-minded about the difference between solving social problems and feeling better about them.  So at the risk of doing the latter without the former, I wonder if the resiliency of Japan's population can be at all supported through collective action of a poetic nature, a broad-scale inhabited metaphor:

We will be your lead, and our own.  We will shoulder your weight with you, diffuse your pain as the radiation diffuses over us and the planet. 

Let the lead be live.

(Image of the radiation-stopping properties of lead from BBC)     
]]> Design miracle tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.230 2011-03-12T10:59:53Z 2011-03-12T11:40:11Z Maya
"Ask and it shall be given you" is not typically a phrase in which I put much stock.  After all, I've been asking for some pretty basic things for an awful long time - a home, financial stability, a family - without having been given in any readily cognizable way. 

Of course, I haven't been asking Jesus for these things, so maybe that's the problem.  On the other hand, maybe the key is to ask for less foundational, more tangible things.

In a prior post, I asked for a better cover image for the audio book of my second novel, The Swing of Beijing, than the one I'd come up with myself.  Remarkably, despite the rather conspicuous lack of material reward associated with my request, it has been given.  And not by Jesus. 

My saint in my hour of need is the talented, multi-lingual, well-read and generous Kurt Rodahl Hoppe.  For those of my loyal blog readers who recognize Kurt's name, it's true that Kurt doesn't flirt, but - as the image above demonstrates - what he can do with graphic design software redeems not merely this shortcoming, but that same shortcoming in all his countrymen.  Not quite Jesus-level redemption, but possibly worthy of worship nonetheless.  Thank you Kurt, and amen!
]]> Take this book jacket graphic - please tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.229 2011-03-08T08:29:46Z 2011-03-08T08:52:28Z Maya
Book jacket graphics seem to be the locus of all manner of anxiety for authors.  I believe it's a law of physics that authors - universally - are required to hate the cover art on their books.  And, as I've blogged previously (here and here), when dealing with international, cross-cultural or multi-racial stories and / or authors, the visual representations of those stories become extremely contested.

In all these contests, however, the author squares off against his or her publisher.  I have never before known a situation in which the author's nemesis is herself.  Yet that is the situation in which I find myself.

In conjunction with my (shortly) forthcoming audiobook version of my second novel, The Swing of Beijing, I need to include a picture with the audio file.  If the book had been published, that picture would be its cover; since the book is not yet published, I need to furnish a "cover equivalent."

The experience of assembling this cover equivalent has given me new empathy for graphic designers who work at publishing companies.  The process seems simple: get a relevant image and juxtapose it in a visually-pleasing way with the title of the book and the author's name.  Duh.  Yet my efforts suggest that the process's "simplicity" is more alleged than actual.

You can see the results above and draw your own conclusions about how lucky the world is that I have not attempted to inflict my graphic design work more widely on the innocent public.  The nicest thing one can say about this proposed cover is, I believe, that it's very DIY.  The font, in particular, comes awfully close to inducing stomach cramps. 

Nonetheless, I have surrendered to my limitations and throw myself on the mercy of my blog readers.  Anyone who wants to send me a proposed cover of their own making will find a happy recipient at maya.alexandri [at] gmail.com.  If I use your proposed cover with the audio book, you will receive - in addition to the privilege of licensing your work to me for free - a free copy of the audio book and my undying gratitude.    
]]> Merchant-Ivory's new clothes tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.228 2011-02-28T12:11:59Z 2011-02-28T13:38:46Z Maya Room_w_a_View_Helena_Bonham-Carter.jpg
In their film version of E.M. Forster's A Room with a View, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory make an error that quite possibly is a first for book-to-screen adaptations: they make the sex less controversial.  Specifically, they uncouple the sex from religion, stripping the romance between Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson of the trappings of transcendence and holiness in which Forster had clothed it.  In place of Foster's couple surrendering to the divinity of sexually-vibrant love, Merchant and Ivory give us a pair relieving themselves of silly Victorian repression in order to obtain self-fulfillment.  Superficially persuasive, perhaps, but not what Forster wrote.

In A Room with a View, Forster's didactic side is irrepressible and insistent on teaching that God is in the pleasures of the flesh, that religion errs when it banishes the body from the realm of the holy, and that the only correct response to desire is to act upon it. 

"Passion is sanity," admonishes old Mr. Emerson, and "love is of the body. . . . Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!" 

Mr. Emerson's words succeed in "robb[ing] the body of its taint," and his version of reality thereby prevails over that of poor, likable Reverend Mr. Beebe, who agrees to help Lucy because of his "belief in celibacy" and his determination that, by "plac[ing] [Lucy] out of danger until she could confirm her resolution of virginity," he is helping "not only Lucy, but religion also." 

Mr. Beebe's soul shall not be liberated, not in A Room with a View.  

Not when Lucy runs off with George Emerson after finally grasping "the holiness of direct desire."  Sex with George in the loving context of matrimony is a sacred imperative to E.M. Forster.

To Merchant and Ivory, it's little more than an opportunity for an orgasm.  Gone from the film's dialogue are Mr. Emerson's references to the holy-carnal.  (Indeed, the film splits up his critical interview with Lucy, having Mr. Emerson spend half the time speaking to Lucy's spinster cousin, Charlotte, a prude on whom such a sermon would have been wasted.)  Nor does the film include any inkling of Mr. Beebe's religious abstinence.  As for "the holiness of direct desire," all we get is the genial approbation of sexual longing acknowledged and acted upon in a socially responsible way.  In place of the ecstasy and rapture of Saint Theresa, we get Dr. Ruth.  Superficially persuasive, perhaps, but not what Forster wrote.

In a moment of irony, the film includes a quote of something Forster did write: "Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes."  Possibly Merchant and Ivory felt that makers of costume dramas are exempted from this wisdom.  To the contrary: new clothes often signal new values.  And while it might seem easy to understand the cut of an Edwardian dress, it may be less difficult to comprehend that a modern, sexual-health marriage doesn't fit inside it.
   
(Image of Helena Bonham-Carter in the Merchant-Ivory film version of A Room with a View from Duke University's website)
]]> With failure like this, who needs success? tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.227 2011-02-27T06:42:30Z 2011-02-27T08:29:43Z Maya EM_Forster_BBC.jpg
My last post constituted a kind of footnote to my penultimate post, and now I have to confess something embarrassing about footnotes: I've never written just one.  They always seem to proliferate on me.

So here's another footnote to that penultimate post, in which I casually referred to E.M. Forster's A Room with a View as, variously, "uneven" and "at times . . . implausible."  I hadn't included any evidence supporting those judgments in the post and, though I think the judgments are warranted, I also think that, without elaboration, they're unfair.  So I elaborate.

My concerns rest on two scenes.  Both involve conversational confrontations that lead to personal transformations.  Both seem to reflect, not human behavior as lived and observed, but characters' behavior as imagined by an optimistic author determined to craft salvation for his creations, whether deserving or no.

In the first scene, Lucy Honeychurch tells Cecil Vyse, her fiancé, that she won't marry him.  As her reason, she proffers that he's "the sort who can't know any one intimately."  She condemns him for "always protecting" her and not "let[ting] me be myself."  She calls him "conventional" because he "may understand beautiful things," but he doesn't "know how to use them."  (p. 201.)

Cecil, up until this point, has been controlling, condescending and conniving about getting his way.  He seems well-defended against any reality that shows his asshole personality.  Nor does his asshole personality seem to encompass being a good sport about rejection.  Nonetheless, wholly outside of his character, he replies:

It is true.
. . . .
True, every word.  It is a revelation.  It is - I.
. . . .
He repeated: "'The sort that can know no one intimately.'  It is true.  I fell to pieces the very first day we were engaged.  I behaved like a cad to Beebe and to your brother.  You are even greater than I thought."
(p. 202.)  Then, with dignity and grace, and without much further ado, he departs.

Now I have, in my day, broken up with one or two men.  I've also taken other men to task for asshole behavior, actions which - in a more or less direct way - led to them breaking up with me.  And based on these experiences, I find Cecil's response so implausible that I'm tempted to hazard that E.M. Forster has never witnessed - or received an accurate second-hand account of - an actual break-up between a male and a female.

This scene is a contrivance.  Resulting not from organic interaction between the characters, but from authorial sentimentality for Cecil and a need to advance the plot and deepen Lucy's character development, the scene is a gentle redemption of Cecil that paves the way for Lucy's redemption two chapters on.  Unsurprisingly, Lucy's redemption is the second scene with which I take issue.

In this second engineered exchange, George Emerson's father talks Lucy into marrying George.  His technique is a bit brutal by Edwardian standards.  He "mean[s] to shock" Lucy with references to the carnal: "I only wish poets would say this, too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the body. . . . Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!"  And he warns Lucy that, "It isn't possible to love and to part. . . . You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.  I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal."  (p. 237.)  He urges her, "When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love - Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made."  (p. 238.)

This entreaty frightens Lucy, but it also revolutionizes her.  Despite her commitment to travel to Greece, despite having spent her mother's money on travel arrangements, despite being revealed as untrustworthy and unreliable to her family and Mr. Beebe, despite her ordinariness, prudishness and inexperience, she will now radically alter her life's course and marry George.  Mr. Emerson's speech had "robbed the body of its taint, the world's taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire."  (p. 240.)

Without getting too graphic, I'll assert that I think I know a thing or two about the holiness of direct desire, and I've never experienced it in conversation with a lover-to-be's father.  I won't go so far as to say that my experience is definitive, but I feel myself on comfortable ground calling this scene, as I did previously, a deus ex machina.  It's a wondrous machine for transporting sheltered little Lucy into the wide-open world of adult love . . . but none of us have ever traveled in such a machine because it doesn't exist.  What does exist - and what constitutes the conduit from innocence to sexual maturity that most (if not all) of us traverse - is a poorly-lit path, pitted with potholes and lined with muggers and thieves.

This reliance on artifice and contrivance, rather than the grit of reality, may be one reason why Forster is so often demoted from the top ranks of novelists:  "There's something middling about Forster," writes Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books, "he is halfway to where people want him to be."

And yet, despite my own objections to Forster's rude artifice, despite my sense that it adds "uneven" and "implausible" elements to his work, I don't think these flaws make Forster "middling."  Shakespeare, too, is uneven (Henry VIII anyone?) and implausible elements abound in his works (A Winter's Tale, hello?); still, Shakespeare is tops, and anyone who disagrees is a "three-inch fool."

Forster reached for artifice (I'm guessing) for the best reasons: he was imagining a world that didn't exist.  He was giving us a nudge to head for the horizon and, if his vision of what lay beyond didn't accord with what was actually there, it doesn't make him less of a visionary.  As Zadie Smith notes about Forster's literary criticism, he had an uncanny ability to be "right" about his contemporaries, to make judgments with which later generations agree - to see accurately in the midst of the thicket. 

Forster, I think, had the same gift of insight about human behavior.  What he seems to have lacked in A Room with a View was the ability to imagine the alternatives that humans eventually adopted, as well as the literary and narrative capacities to allow his characters to lead him where he wouldn't have otherwise have gone.  Still, a truly middling novelist is unlikely to have failed as graciously, and as entertainingly thought-provokingly, as Forster.     
 
(Image of E.M. Forster from BBC)
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