"Love Actually" is about the Impossible Desire of the Other

This being the start of the holiday season (not that it means we have less work to do), we watched "Love Actually" for the 521st time, after friends that we lent the DVD to returned it to us. ("It's just gotten back, why don't we watch it ....)

I've always had a vague notion about the racist constructions of desire in the film, but this watching crystallized my ideas. And since the film plays ad nauseam during the holiday seasons, here's to ruining everyone's favorite romantic comedy.

My analysis begins with Salvoj Žižek. Not an idea, but a Youtube video where he magically uncovers "The Sound of Music" as an unexpected space where Fascist fantasies live and thrive. Žižek's argument is simple. And while its extremely reductive, it's fun if you don't take it too seriously. (But how many of us DO take The Sound of Music and Love Actually much too seriously ...?) He argues that the Austrians, the Von Trapps included I assume, even though representing the anti-Fascist Austrian resistance, are figured along the lines of Fascist ideals: the children in uniform, marching, hierarchized according to age, all disciplined to sing and display their talent. (Of course for the sake for argument he conveniently omits the inconsistencies of this generalization.) On the other hand, the Fascist elements within the film are represented as sophisticated genteel, glove wearing, cigarette holder smoking figures, or as Žižek puts it, by displaced stereotypes of Jewish decadence. So, he says that The Sound of Music appeals because it is able to represent an official ideological construction that we have all been taught to embrace—anti-Fascism—while indulging our secret fantasies for Fascism.

So, Love Actually is about the impossible desire of the Other, simultaneously constructing a politically correct film depicting race as irrelevant to relationships but still nurturing racist attitudes unconsciously. Its constructions of black/brownness appear to embrace a post-racial cosmopolitan sexuality, where skin color is no boundary to love. But in its representations of inter-racial couples, especially of the black figures in the film, it indulges our secret racist fantasies while preserving the specter of miscegenation.

"No Surprises?"


The interracial marriage between Mark and Juliet (pictured above left) that opens the movie is the clearest example of this doubled construction of race. Even though Mark's best-friend, Peter (lurking in the background), is infatuated with Juliet, no love triagle ensues. Instead, Peter's repressed desire finally gets communicated to Juliet, first against his will when she watches the video he makes of the wedding, and later when he does his silent card messages. We're left to wonder about what might have happened between Juliet and Peter, and yet that possibility never becomes threatening because Juliet and Peter are both faithful and loyal as wife and friend to Mark. Yet it is precisely [a favorite word of Žižek's, often imprecisely used] because no love-triangle develops that we see how the racial construction proceeds. Even though Peter and Juliet never go beyond a kiss, their story arc is presented as the one that we should be interested in. Untainted by physicality, their (non)relationship becomes the distillation of what 'true love' is. Juliet shares intimate moments with Peter, realizing that he loves her when she watches the video, pretending that its "just carolers" so that he can 'speak' her of his desire. Desire can be kept covert but also be expressed because the mediation of art and technology makes Peter's desire, and Juliet's assent, non-threatening. Even so, the film's representation of these stolen moments constructs their relationship as the 'true' one. Mark, husband and black man, is cuckolded, even though 'nothing happens.'

"You'll Come Back a Broken Man"

Another story line: this time, the black man is marginalized and his status as desiring subject degraded. This story line features John and Judy, who are shy, reserved, but decent individuals even though they work as actor stand-ins in the explicit film industry. Their director, Tony, is black, and nameless until the end of the film.(1) He issues instructions for them to mimic physical intimacy, and he instructs them to perform smutty acts as he watches. He is the black man on the margins, the voyeur whose perverse pleasure is in watching, who can never become fully human in the way John and Judy do through the mundane conversations that develops between them despite their line of work.

Tony is also involved in the film's farcical plot, involving Colin Frisell's fantasies about American women. Believing that gorgeous babes will swoon over his cute British accent, he hatches a hare-brained scheme to go to some bar in America and work his charm. His Tony is the voice of reason, constantly telling Colin that he's totally out of his mind. Colin's crazy scheme actually works, and he beds a bevy of beauties on his first night in America. The black man, as movie director and Colin's friend, remains outside the orbit of desire. Even this farcical British swipe at America is constructed with a clear eye towards the racial taboos that police desire. Consider this: Is not a reversal of roles unimaginable? What if Colin the Brit were also Colin the black man, landing in Milwaukee and trying to pick up white women in a bar in Wisconsin with his cute British accent ... ?

"And they call it Puppy Love ..."

Finally, the possibility of the desires of the Other being taken seriously is undermined by the depiction of prepubescent love. Sam and Joanna's fledgling attraction for each other may be cute, but it's not to be taken seriously. Of course, there is the distinct barrier of geography with Joanna's return to America the very night that Sam expresses his interest in her, but this is merely a convenient 'out' for the film. In a movie where even the 'serious' adult relationships are somewhat suspicious fantasies about the possibilities of love bridging class and personality barriers, the novelty of the interracial union is made even more pronounced by this coupling. What is interesting is the fact that Joanna's black identity is withheld from the audience throughout the movie. Only at the end of the film do we learn that she is black, not only physically but culturally as she wows the crowd with her soulful Mariah Carey number even though Sam has agonized about her throughout. Her blackness, which appears momentarily, and then disappears on a jet-plane, is a key strategy by which the paradoxical racist–politically correct ideological fantasies of the film are sustained.

"All You Need is Love"


Does the film offer any possibilities of serious interracial relationships? One possibility is the romance between Jaime and Aurelia (above left). Even though Jaime is thoroughly English and Aurelia begins the film as a non-English speaking Portuguese immigrant working in France, they do end up together at the end of the film. Their attraction for each other, which blossoms despite their inability to speak to each other in the same language, seems to suggest an aspect of love that manages to transcend the barriers of culture and race.(2) Interestingly, Jaime's (and Aurelia's) sincerity is figured by their willingness to learn the other person's language, and the triumphal scene where Jaime proposes to Aurelia in ungrammatical Portuguese suggests that love can dismantle cultural and racial barriers. But, suspending for the moment the question of social class, is Aurelia all that other? She isn't caucasian, but she is not black either. Perhaps she represents a kind of limit, an acceptable difference that can be overcome through language classes on tape ....

By now, it should be obvious why I've put up the picture on the right, which is a snapshot of the movie's other triumphant relationship. Blackness is acceptable in positions of political achievement, but a romance between the Prime Minister and his tea-girl is much more acceptable as fantasy ....

In sum, I think it's possible to argue that while Love Actually promotes a politically correct view of interracial relationships, its success also depends on the way that it constructs an underlying racist fantasy that upholds the belief that 'true love' can only be found within the boundaries that govern Whiteness.

(1) - He only becomes "Tony" when one of the American babes Colin brings back, a cameo by Denise Richards, names him. He gains nominal identity only as part of the fantastical construct of American female desire.

(2) Another possible trans-racial coupling that I considered was the one between the characters played by Laura Linney and Brazilian superbod Rodrigo Santoro. But on consultation with the resident Love Actually expert (Edna), we agreed that the film doesn't really construct Karl as non-White.

Cold's Coming

Cold's coming marks the
Distance between the places
I call "home" on my body,
As if miles could be etched
By falling degrees.
My body, encapsulated in layered
Warmth, is sedimented geography.

I always wear a Land's End sweater—
Strictly American, catalog shopped—
A Singaporean gift before I
Returned it to the land
Of its merchandising,
Label so faded, its sweatshop past
In another clime unfathomable.

On top of that, an orange hoodie—
"Wild Rivers, Tasmania"—
A tourist buy against
The unexpected cold
At the world's other end.

Or, if my nose doesn't itch,
A black Canterbury
Fleece, that recalls
Another pilgrimage
Medieval souls undertook,
First worn eighteen years ago
When as elite high school
Students we made a study trip
To the Soviet Empire in
Its winter,
Shivering beneath uniform
Black sweaters.

Then, a gray discount
Down overcoat, larger than
It's warm,
And red quilted gloves,
Women's, the only pair from
The remainder bin fitting
My Asian hands.
Bogg boots and knitted
Beanie cap accent
My uncoordination.

Frayed cuffs, torn seams,
Loose elastic, rickety zippers:
Over-worn.
I don't toss them out,
These maps of peregrination.

Unlike our forebears in
Climate controlled Eden,
We wear the fig-leaves
Of our wandering.

How to Lose Your Accent in 28 Days

Concerned about how
My half-breed
Post-colonial tongue
Sounded to non
Non-White ears,
Tired of people inquiring
If I'd come from
Jamaica,
And provoked by
The bemusement caused
When I asked the Home
Depot Guy where
The sink augers were,

I embraced the insult
To identity, searched
Online, and found
"The Accent Reduction
Institute of
Ann Arbor."

"People are going to laugh,"
Edna said, "at an English
Ph.D., going for speech
Classes. All you have
To do is pretend to
Be uppity when you
Speak."

But I didn't want
To sound British or
Posh. I wanted
Words ending
In curled Rs,
Sentences blended
With softened Ts,
Nasalized vowels
On my breath.

I wanted speech to
Defy skin.

Eight hours
Of intensive work to
Straighten out the
Kinks of my tongue,
Would set me back
575 bucks and
I wondered if
I could write a check
Against the white
Man's debt to my people.

I went cheap and put in
A request at the Public
Library for a book
And CD that promised
"952 Ways to
Lose Your Accent
In 28 Days."

The next day, I received
The message:
"Your request is canceled
Because the owning
Library cannot fulfill it."

Instead of turning my
Tongue, perhaps I should
Work on getting it
Canceled.

For Friends Recently Wronged

People who turn to words
Remain indifferent to how
Hypocrites misuse them—
Like decorative party
Wrap around empty boxes,
Or ornamental bows on
Thoughtless trinkets—
By dismissing
The weight, gravity, resistance
Brought by words.

People who stand on words
Can't help but be bemused
When bureaucrats manipulate them—
Like future profit
On short sold shares,
Or bonds
Endlessly derived—
By exaggerating
The hope, power, promise
Contained in words.

People who rest in words
Die a little each time
Hurtful words are spoken—
Like daggers in the back
Suddenly stuck
Or a booby trap's
Deceitful death—
By those who never feel
The peace, healing, wholeness
Secured by words.

Job Searching

I've been rather busy the past month or so getting all my job search materials ready and sending them out. I've sent out the bulk of my applications and still have a few more to go. The challenge of finding places to teach where both Edna and I can work (and live in the same house) has been quite great. I've been on googlemaps a lot, and at this point in the game, I think it's really down to whether we get simultaneously lucky, or whether my strategy of applying to every place where I have even the remotest chance of qualifying will work out.

Here's the list of the places that I'm applying to, divided up by geographical area:

There's the NIE, SIngapore of course. Not in my field of expertise but there are possibilities for both of us here.

Southern California: UC Irvine (most research oriented school in my list), Claremont McKenna College (most selective school on my list - and the most selective liberal arts college in the U.S.), and Cal State, Long Beach (I think I have a fair shot there, and it's by the beach ... )

Bay Area, Californa: Cal State Sacramento. It seems like a nice place to work, but due to California 's uncertainty with the state budget, the position nearby (ok within 100 miles) that Edna was going to apply for is now in limbo!

Wisconsin: Marian U of Fond du Lac, U of Wisconsin Colleges: Baraboo/Sauk & Waukesha (2 year colleges). None of these positions are for medievalists. But they want people who are generalists and who can teach composition, so I'm giving these a shot. Edna's top choice is for a position at Wisconsin-Madison, so these would be near enough.

Chicago: St Xavier University. A medieval position that would be nice. Possibly drivable to Wisconsin Mad - but we'd have to live in-between and still drive A LOT.

Texas: U of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. (Another non-Medievalist position - but there's an opening at UT Austin for Edna).

Pennsylvania / Maryland: Franklin and Marshall College. Another highly selective liberal arts college that would be nice to teach at. Cecil College - a two-year college that wants a generalist.

U of New Hampshire: this is the latest posting on the job list. It's an ideal medieval position for me, but I'm sure competition will be very tough since it's in the heart of New England!

Some (possibly irrelevant) things that I've learnt: 1. Texas is a really really big state. I clicked on every Community College website in the state of Texas looking for jobs near Austin. No luck: the closet I came was for a position in the Spring of next year, and another that wanted someone to teach English and Journalism 2. It's easier to find a "Job Opportunities" link on a 2-year college website (in contrast to four year schools). 3. the U of Wisconsin has the most organized and attractive 2-year college websites ...

Why this Blog is "locked"

This is just a brief post to let readers that I've invited know why the blog requires a log in. I'm applying for jobs both in the U.S. and back home, and I'd rather not have prospective employers snooping around the internet and forming skewed impressions. I'm pretty sure that googling a job applicant is a practice that is extremely common now, even though I really doubt the value of a google search unless an individual is extremely prominent. Coupled with incidents where individuals have been threatened by their employers or dropped from a job search because of the their online personas, I think it's a wise move on my part to just password protect the blog.

Conference Time

It's that time of the year where I desperately send out paper proposals for medieval conference presentations. Here are two of my latest offerings that I've submitted. Hopefully they'll be accepted!

A paper proposal for a panel on Kings and Kingship in the Middle Ages. I hope this one gets accepted so that I get to go to Boston.

All the King's Bodies: Embodying Authority in Havelok the Dane and King Horn

The Middle English romances Havelok the Dane and King Horn both feature protagonists whose right to rule is stolen early on in the romance. In this paper, I suggest that both protagonists learn that the manipulation of their own bodies is key to regaining royal authority. Even though the thrones of Denmark and Suddene are theirs by birth, Havelok and Horn must allow their bodies to mature and be transformed in order to regain what is theirs. Havelok's exceptional physical appetites and strength becomes subordinated to a more symbolic and rhetorical conception of his body. From being trapped by a body that only experiences the immediacy of hunger and cold, Havelok re-conceptualizes his body as a symbol of the nation before the marks of kingship on his body can be publicly identified and rallied around. Similarly, Horn's unmatched physical attractiveness is disguised both literally and through his careful speech en route to the throne. Instead of thinking of the protagonist as the solitary hero who proves himself worthy of the throne, locating their right to rule in the body considers the various forces of association and nurture that come into play. Specifically, Havelok's and Horn's bodies are shaped by their contact with a host of surrogate fathers who take the place of their dead fathers. These older male figures protect and guide the protagonists on their quests and enable the protagonists to adopt conceptions of the body that are more readily used for political ends than the abstract ideals of kingship represented by their dead fathers. I end the paper by suggesting how these romances connect with Ernst Kantorowicz's work on the genesis and development of the notion of the "King's Two Bodies" and argue that the presentation of the malleable body in both romances respond to the challenges to the king's position in the body politic that occurred in thirteenth-century England.

... and here's another one. I'm trying something slightly different from my 'usual' work. It's for a panel on Animals and Ethics at Kalamazoo! (I owe the title to a memory of Al Pacino 'dying' in "Looking for Richard")

"A Horse, a Horse, my Kingdom for a Horse!": Valuing Arondel in Bevis of Hampton

The Middle English Bevis of Hampton does not conclude with Bevis ruling England or Armenia, the principal kingdoms of the romance. Curiously, Bevis ends up ruling over Mombraunt, a kingdom with a relatively minor role in the narrative. To explain this state of affairs, I turn to Bevis's relationship with his horse, Arondel. In this paper, I attempt to describe Bevis's special relationship with Arondel, arguing that this relationship cannot really be equated to anthropocentric concepts such as "friendship" or "loyalty". Inspired by Donna Haraway's exploration of the dense networks of biocapital and commodification that connect people and animals "in the naturecultures of lively capital," the paper traces how the narrative struggles and fails to find a fixed value for Arondel. Like the dogs that Donna Haraway writes about, Arondel is variously treated as a commodity, labor, as well as a consumer through his connections with Bevis and other humans. At the same time, the people that come into contact with Arondel have their identities as stable human subjects challenged and the multi-faceted nature of these bonds make it impossible to reduce the description of Arondel to that of the 'loyal beast'. Unlike other animal companions of romance, whose only reward for loyalty is human companionship, Arondel receives much more: fame, a castle, Bevis's willingness to go into exile, and prayers said on his behalf. In a romance in which the protagonist's own worth is challenged by his biological and surrogate human families, in which he needs to prove himself by battling non-human creatures, Bevis responds to something in Arondel that lies outside the rubric of social estimations of animal worth: Perhaps Bevis does give up kingdoms in exchange for an existence with a horse.


"A horse, a horse ..."

Too Many Errors

I managed to cause this screen to pop up yesterday on the latest chapter of my dissertation. It's the first time that I've seen this error message. It came up on page 76 at the 21 659 word mark. I guess this chapter DOES have lots of strangely spelled early Middle English words!

On Reading

Given that I spend much of the day reading, this recent article on reading in the NYT caught my eye. It's rather long but well worth the time. Of course, I was also rather interested in it because it deals with whether or not the Internet has had a negative impact on the ability of children and adults to think. Reading, of course, is the site of contention in all this. The tussle is over whether interacting with non-traditional texts via the Internet is compromising our ability to store and analyze information. I guess that a high level of competence in traditional literacies has always been a gold-standard of sorts when it comes with academic and intellectual success, and whether being literate in the new media of the Internet promotes a similar form of intellectual growth, retards our ability to think, or complements a more traditional view of literacy and intelligence, is really an interesting debate. Of course, it smacks of the "Is TV Bad For You?" debate, but just as the cloning controversy is a more interesting variation of the abortion debate, the Internet offers more complicated options than TV.

From a personal perspective, I could easily see myself as a proponent of either camp. Given that I've plowed through my fair share of heavy going novels, it would serve my sense of moral indignation to condemn YouTube, Facebook, and yes, blogs. And I think a certain amount of this is clear from the article. Those who speak in defense of more traditional literacies seem motivated to hold off what they see as a decay civilization, as they've defined it of course. I suppose there's a bit of a conservative streak in me that suggests that everyone should avail themselves to the same modes of suffering (as well as pleasure) that I've associated with reading. I get the sense that it's more than "academic outcomes" or "intellectual achievement" that's at stake: It's also about how we define our cultural technologies and who manages to dictate how subjectivities are formed (and controlled) vis a vis these.

I also do my fair share of "new media" perusing. I haven't read a traditional newspaper in years, love YouTube, and when the mood strikes me, could be up there with the most fanatical of users of chat programs (Ok, the last claim is probably untrue, and unlike a real savvy Internet multi-tasker, I really can't do much else except chat when I chat). I often think about how I'd probably wouldn't have done well in the O- and A- Levels or University exams if I had had the Internet access which we all now take for granted. Even now, I get endlessly interrupted (ok, distracted) with all the measureless and meandering paths to procrastination that the Internet has to offer. Surely the time and pleasure one spends surfing has to count for some expansion of one's intellectual powers? So I get it when the hordes of academics cited by the NYT article put up a doughty defense for the new literacies that are so different from traditional reading that new measures and definitions of literacy are called for. At the same time, I wonder if a lot of this has to do with make a big ballyhoo out of very little. I'm really cynical about endless academic claims in support of Internet literacies because they really does come off as cultivating niche areas of research that don't really tell us anything profound about how we think or process information. (I should be honest about this and state that I did write a Masters thesis on how Electronic Message Boards promote critical literacy and empower students .... Hah!) Still, if an academic wins acclaim (and tenure, promotion, and the good life) by defending web-surfing habits, more power to him (and her).

In one sense, the conflict over reading literacy and Internet literacy recalls medieval debates over the growth of writing. With the growth of writing as a technology of the mind, medieval thinkers were afraid that people would lose the arts of memory, and eventually lose both knowledge and the ability to reason because they'd become to dependent on marks on a page. The way that the Internet is becoming everybody's prosthetic memory (and perhaps brain) parallels this medieval anxiety about the loss of knowledge. This article that is in the Atlantic (which the NYT article refers to) discusses the issue quite nicely. I've never really had a good memory (and no, just because I'm a Lit student does not mean I can quote from the Western canon at will, though if I could it would be really cool ...), so I can't really tell if the Internet has made me dumber. I will, however, say that accumulating information does give one the sense that one has processed and thought about the stuff. So, clicking through links and quickly browsing Wikipedia does often cause me to think that I'm learning stuff that I'm probably not. But this isn't new. I remember how we (while in JC and Uni) would photocopy reams of articles from journals and books and feel as if we'd done a whole lot of studying. It's a good thing that photocopying is so expensive here, it forces me to sit in the library and take notes by hand, and I think I tend to process the information more diligently than if I were to mindlessly underline sections and merely make marginal comments.

I return to this post after a bit of a break.

A book that I finished about a week ago, and had begun when I first started out this post, deals with the relationship between knowing stuff and being smart, and the relevance of factoids in life, involving issues, I guess, that are tangentially touched upon by the articles I refer to above. It's by A.J. Jacobs, who is quite a character (in a preppy, nerdy, "everyone-graduated-from-Harvard-or-Yale, I-only-went-to-Brown" kind of way), and it's called "The Know It All". It's really quite an intriguing feat that he undertakes. Jacobs decides to read the entire Encycleopedia Britannica. Yup, from A to Z. It's pretty amazing that he manages to do it, all 44 million words within a year, WHILE keeping his day job as an editor at Esquire. It's an easy and entertaining read (Jacobs's book, I mean) but his chatty writing style doesn't obscure the greatness of his achievement or the his enthusiasm for knowledge. Another more recently published book by Ammon Shea, recounts his experience reading the entire OED.

So what do these epic reading enterprises, undertaken in an age of media proliferation tell us about how knowledge is valued in a world where technology appears to be muscling out traditional literacies? I guess reading has become, from a certain perspective, a vast undertaking. There is now a certain novelty attached to reading, and reading what appears to be dry as dust material for pleasure is an oddity of sorts. I also think that the participatory effect of reading, which is still valued at a really young age, is somehow pushed aside by the richness of the new media. No one reads out loud nowadays, at least it takes a conscious effort to do so; and, people don't read that much to each other anymore. The private experience of reading has been made an even more exclusive and exclusionary practice, since the ease with which one can respond through writing or performing on new media texts makes the performance of the traditional text laborious and time-consuming.

I know all this sounds nostalgic for a past where we spent a little more time feeling the rustle of pages between our fingers, and spending entire days with books rather than blogs, and it is, in part. But I'm just not exactly ready to trumpet the wholesale triumph of the new media over my books, if only because books still look great all lined up on the shelf.

Blurbs From a Blogger

It occurred to me this morning, as I was walking Sourdough, that I have every right to call myself a "Blogger". It came as a bit of a surprise, as most revelations of the obvious do, and it caused me to see myself quite differently. Now, I realize that "real" Bloggers, whether full-time or not, celebrated or reviled, actually get more than 3 page views a day (I think that's my average, if I count my own visits to the blog ...), write about important matters (like "Obama needs a New Hairdo and so do You"), generate lots of publicity, and contribute to the general course of human affairs, from behind (or is it in front of ... ?) the near-anonymity of a computer terminal.

But, as you, dear Reader, have no doubt noticed, there IS a new look to this blog. And moving away from the classic blog platform (goodbye outmoded javascript slideshow ...) to Blogger's WordPress-Wannabe Widget Filled Universe has prompted me to cast a retrospective glance at my early output. I'm in the process of cleaning up the interface as well as re-visiting some of my earlier posts. Reading some of the stuff that I wrote way back – especially from 2001-4 – for instance, I'm struck by how prolific I was in those days. Of course, prolific doesn't mean the writing is good or even thoughtful. But there was just a lot of stuff. In "those" heady days, I used a really cheesy platform called "Free Open Diary". Then it was just words – no pictures, no music, no video – just words, a lot of them. And it was great fun then, as there was a relative large and vibrant community of Open Diarists in the school where I taught. There were inevitable attempts by the more daring or cheeky of my students to make overt references to each diary entry whenever I stepped into class, but I managed to keep those worlds somewhat separate, though inextricably bound as my entries were often commentaries on what was going on in school and in the classroom. In retrospect, I think writing on the thing shaped the kind of teacher (and possibly person) I became in those years and created all sorts of opportunities for interaction with students that my official school persona may not have afforded. I'm sure that blogging is now taken for granted by teachers as a means of communicating certain "unmentionables" to students, but I'm glad I was involved in it at a time when not that many people (at least people I knew) wrote on blogs.

So, patiently, with much perseverance, I'm going back to these old entries and straightening them out, correcting grammar and spelling where I find errors, and putting them onto their proper blog page. (In switching platforms, I plonked whole months into a single entry and haven't really sieved through them properly). In the meantime, I've created a "Blast From the Past" link on my new blog interface (using the nice link widget) where I'll put entries that strike a chord with me in this re-vamping exercise. And of course, I'll continue to feel happy about calling myself a Blogger.

Now back to the Dissertation.

Strange Culture

Sometime in 2005, I attended a talk by Steve Kurtz, an Art professor, who was in the midst of being persecuted by post-Sep 11 paranoia. Just a few days ago, browsing the shelves of the public library, I came across this cool documentary, Strange Culture, that was made in 2006/7, which was about his case. It not only traces the tragedy with enormous sympathy and precision, it also employs a clever blend of dramatization (Tilda Swinton plays his wife, whose tragic death was the genesis of the entire bizarre affair). Even more remarkable is that fact that at the time that they were making the doc, Kurtz's case was still unresolved, and he was still facing the prospect of many years in jail. The film is not only a sensitive rendering of the entire affair, but also fleshes out the broader implications of the case for basic human and academic freedom.

In brief, here's what happened. Kurtz was, and still is, a critical artist. So his stuff is radical art that questions the relationship between art and science. In the talk I attended, he said that his mission has always been to try to use art to put science in the hands of the people, because the general population has been alienated from science by big corporate interests. Anyway, he was working on a project that involved the critique of bio-warfare when his wife died of a heart attack in her sleep. He called 911, and when responders came, they noticed that he had a lot of science equipment at home. And so, the FBI and the bioterrorism task force was notified, and he was eventually taken away (illegally) on the suspicion that he was a bioterrorist. Despite repeated attempts by him and his colleagues to explain to the FBI that "this is what he does, and has been doing all along ...", the government was set on charging him with something. In the end, because there was no way that the bioterrorism charges could be filed (all the stuff he had was legal, harmless, and could be bought over the Internet), they decided to charge him with "wire fraud" and "mail fraud".* In essence, the government, riding on post Sep 11 paranoia, was using its expanded powers to silence voices of dissent by concocting scenarios that are best described as Kafkaesque.

The good news is that he was cleared of everything in April this year, and I found this interview from June where he recounts the entire ordeal, being able to speak openly about the facts of the case for the first time. His interview with Amy Goodman begins at 35:35.



* As I understand it, the prosecution's attempt to charge Kurtz with mail and wire fraud stood on the fact that he'd gotten his research collaborator to buy the reagents that he needed for his work from a supplier who does not sell to individuals, but only to institutional accounts that are registered with them. It's as if I bought a second hand book from Amazon.com on behalf of someone in Singapore because Amazon.com second hand book sellers won't ship internationally. Because I bought the books with the intent of circumventing this system, I (as well as the person receiving the books) am guilty of mail fraud along the lines of the crime that the govt was trying to charge Kurtz with.

Pecan Pie

Pecan pie happens to be one of my favorite deserts - after carrot cake, of course. I made my first one yesterday. Lots of recipes call for corn syrup, which apart from being really bad for you, is also the poster child for everything wrong with the food industry, so I made one with honey instead!

Chomksy At Google

Here's a good Chomsky talk. Interesting because it's wide-ranging and pitched at a broad audience rather than the endless (and damning) slew of facts and figures that Chomksy usually broadsides American policy with.

Berry Good Pie

Two pies! Above - the raspberry-strawberry-rhubarb pie that I made last week. It was runny and I had to resort to desperate measures that involved performing extensive drainage operations. But, I'm pleased to say that this is the first pie where I'm happy with the crust. The key to good crust (for me): vodka. (What I lack in skill I make up for in exotic ingredients but there's a nice scientific explanation for using vodka - it evaporates quickly!) Having rhubarb in a pie was something I had to do having read about rhubarb and heard about it all my life. Turned out to be a nicely tart combination. Below - I made this 'largely blueberry pie' today with the berries we had left in the fridge and freezer. To circumvent the runny insides, I used a corn-starch filler recipe, and for double insurance, made a crumb top so that the juices could evaporate.

You, Who Hear My Singing

I've been working on putting together (yet another) new blog, one that documents my attempts to make music. It started with an interest in figuring out how to put one of those audio players on a blog page and then took a life its own. Anyway, if you're interested in hearing me sing badly, play the guitar (and banjo) in a variety of styles, see what I've been up to musically, and perhaps even sing along ... it's here:

http://youwhohearmysinging.blogspot.com/

Great Nader Lecture

Given the terrible and widespread public misperception that Ralph Nader "cost" Al Gore the election in 2000, I doubt that many people are interested in hearing what the man has to say. Even so, here's Nader in his own words. He's fantastic and if I were pressed to say who I supported in this U.S. election, I'd pick Nader. What is great about this lecture is the fact that he very fondly includes anecdotes about how his time at Princeton shaped his desire to change things. I've put all parts in a play list and playing them one after another should be quite intuitive!

Midnight's Sighs

I like Salman Rushdie! Along with Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon (and perhaps Don Delillo and let's not forget Jhumpa Lahiri, S.R. Delany and Ursula Le Guin, and Ian McEwan ... ok this list might go on a bit ... ), he's probably one of the few living writers that I'm quite keen about. I'm actually reading The Moor's Last Sigh right now and it's fabulous. My Salman Rushdie moments include 1. explaining why I liked Midnight's Children to a tutor during NUS who liked to grill students about what they were reading "outside" the curriculum. 2. Finding a copy of the Satanic Verses in the French section of Kino. I guess it's ok to read banned books in French. and 3. actually liking The Ground Beneath Her Feet (as well as the U2 song of the same name that Rushdie penned) very much. 4. Of course, I've never had the chance to meet the man, though a friend who has managed to get in a question about his favorite book (if I remember the anecdote correctly) - which happens to be Haroun. I guess if one wanted to see what the whole fuss was about either Midnight's Children or The Moor's Last Sigh would be great representatives of Rushdie's strange blend of poetry, wit, wordplay, irreverence and abiding respect for history. For a fun read, there's Haroun. For a sense of how clever Rushdie can be with myths and intertextual referencing, there's The Ground Beneath Her Feet as well as Fury. There's lots of Rushdie that I haven't read - including his two most recent books - so there's lots for me to enjoy!

Anyway, despite the silliness of lists like these, I will say that I like some of the other people on the "Best of the Booker" shortlist. There was a time that I was really into Peter Carey, and I liked Pat Baker's WWI trilogy immensely. News like this always causes me to go hunt for stuff by these authors I haven't read! Another wonderful distraction!

LONDON (Reuters) - British author Salman Rushdie won the "Best of the Booker" prize on Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of one of the world's most prestigious literary awards.

"Midnight's Children" won the Booker Prize in 1981, and the Indian-born writer was hot favorite to take the award decided by the public from a shortlist of six in an online poll.

The 61-year-old, whose 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats against him, also won the 25th anniversary Booker prize in 1993.

"I think it was an extraordinary shortlist and it was an honor to be on it," Rushdie said in a recorded message from the United States, where he is on a book tour.

His sons, Zafar and Milan, accepted a trophy in London on his behalf, and the author said it was apt that "my real children (are) accepting a prize for my imaginary children."

Milan, the youngest, added: "I'm really looking forward to reading it when I'm older. Well done Dad."

Victoria Glendinning, chair of the panel who drew up a shortlist, said the entries were dominated by themes of the end of empire and two world wars.

"These are the nettles we have been compelled to try and grasp," she told reporters.

But there was some criticism of the award, partly because the choice was narrowed to just six nominees.

"It's an artificial exercise, simply because the general public only got to pick from six of the previous winners," said Jonathan Ruppin, promotions manager at Foyles bookshop.

"Readers have not been able to vote for some of their most enduring favorites," he added, mentioning, among others, Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" and Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day."

ONLINE POLL

Around 8,000 people from around the world took part in the online poll, and Midnight's Children won 36 percent of votes.

At least half the voters were under 35, and the largest age group was 25-34, "a reflection of the ongoing interest in quality fiction amongst readers of all ages," organizers said.

Midnight's Children, an example of Rushdie's magical realist style, follows Saleem Sinai who is born on the stroke of midnight on the day of India's independence in 1947 and whose life loosely parallels the fortunes of his nascent country.

Some critics believe it is Rushdie's finest work, eclipsing subsequent novels including The Satanic Verses, for which he remains best known.

What was perceived to be the questioning of the tenets of Islam in The Satanic Verses led to book burnings and riots across the Muslim world culminating in a death edict against Rushdie by Iran's supreme religious leader.

The author was forced into hiding for nine years.

The other nominees included Nobel Prize winners J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, both born in South Africa.

The full list comprised Rushdie, Pat Barker (The Ghost Road), Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda), Coetzee (Disgrace), J.G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur) and Gordimer (The Conservationist).

Both Coetzee and Carey have won the Booker Prize twice.

The Booker rewards the best novel each year by a writer from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country.

Recent Kitchen Exploits

Just messing around with the slideshow function in Picassa. So 1. I made quiche just so I could experiment more with pie-crusts. Making good pie crust has become the Holy Grail of my baking endeavors. This attempt wasn't great - too crumbly. 2. That's almost entirely homemade bruschetta. The bread was sliced and toasted from a homemade baguette, the basil and tomatoes were from the plants we've been nurturing since May. Now if only I could get a cow to fit on the balcony then we'd have homemade cheese as well ... but this was excellent smoked cheddar from the MSU Diary Store. 3. More bread - focus on the pan, not my strange "I'm-trying-to-look-pleased-with-my-efforts" semi-grin. Crusty dinner rolls this time, superb with any kind of stew!

"They're GREEN ... but chewy ..."

So, I decided to do something different after the moderate success of the fruit tart (which is still sitting in the fridge, tempting me to pack on the calories every time I open it ...) Edna likes chewy oatmeal raisin cookies, and I figured that to increase my chances of making something that she would find palatable (and thus not end up eating everything myself), I'd make those.
To add to the interest value of the project, I decided that I'd substitute butter with avocado. As every avid reader of SHAPE magazine knows, avocado is supposed to be a great substitute for butter -- and Edna reminded me. However, we didn't remember which issue actually had a recipe, and instead of flipping through a year's worth of magazine's, I decided, totally arbitrarily, that

1 Avocado = 1 stick of butter

So, the first instruction was something like "whip butter until creamed ..." and I'm like, ok, how does one do that with two somewhat mushy avocados? I ended up cutting them into small bits with my now trusty pastry cutter, and stirring them vigorously. Despite having religiously done bicep curls and miscellaneous arm moves for a while now, my forearms were getting tired with the whisk I was using (Someone should work out the Cook's Work Out). An amazing thing happened, however, after I added sugar and continued stirring vigorously: the mixture actually did become a little fluffy! Which was the very moment when I realized that I'd forgotten to buy the OATS from Meijer ... Thankfully, oats ARE a low-cost convenience food and I managed to walk out to a nearby gas-station and get a tub of good old Quaker Oats (who says gas-stations only stock junk food ....)

Anyway, the cookies are great, even if their odd shape illustrates how aesthetically challenged I am. As Edna put it, some of them are monstrously large - but at least now I can eat just one cookie and say that it was satisfying ... They don't taste too rich, because there isn't any butter in them and they're extremely moist and chewy. Of course, they are really quite green!

Getting Flaky?

Having recently finished a chapter of the dissertation, I decided to do something different for the next few days before starting up again. I ended up making a fruit tart today. I was pretty keyed up to do this - I even went out and got a pastry cutter to make sure that I wouldn't smear the butter. It turned out quite nicely, except that my inexperience with pie crusts meant that it definitely could have been much more flaky - I think I added too much water in trying to get the dough to "come together" cause I don't think I worked it too hard. But I've done my homework (by watching videos on crust making technique - though it's pretty unbelievable how these people get the dough to stay together with the tiny amounts of water they use ... ) and I'm going to try this again ... soon! And I'll make sure I do fancy edges the next time! Still, the tart IS really yummy - at least Edna thinks so!

The Riddle Song

Here's a great song that I've been singing for about a year. I first heard a Doc Watson version of the song and then a wonderful duet which featured Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. The simplicity and the riddle, question, and answer structure of the song makes it really charming. I guess it's also somewhat appropriate for me since 1. we're now living in Cherry Abundant Michigan and 2. my life's work is wrapped up in stories that normally have endings - if not always satisfactory ones - so it's nice to sing a song that turns that expectation on its head ...



I gave my love a cherry, that had no stone
I gave my love a chicken, that had no bone
I told my love a story, that had no end
And I gave my love a baby, with no crying.

How can there be a cherry, that has no stone?
How can there be a chicken that has no bone?
How can there be a story that has no end?
How can there be a baby with no crying?

A cherry when it's blooming, it has no stone.
A chicken when it's pipping, it has no bone.
The story of my love, it has no end.
And a baby when it's sleeping, there's no crying.

The Road To Boston

Here's a little tune called "On the Road to Boston", somewhat appropriate given the Celtics' remarkable come back last night. And yes, that's me and my banjo playing efforts.

"My" Guitar

Being fortunate enough to live in the hometown of Eldery Instruments, I've been paying regular visits to the store. I've fallen in love with a particular guitar and I now call it "my" guitar, even though there's not the slightest chance of me ever owning this particular gem.

It's a little parlor guitar made by two luthiers who are based in Vermont. Their company -- Froggy Bottom -- makes acoustic guitars that have won awards and are consistently heralded with much acclaim. This one's no exception.

What I really love about this guitar is how responsive it is in the bass and mid ranges for a small guitar. Playing a bigger body Taylor after trying out this guitar makes the Taylor sound thin and stiff in the lower range (and this was a decent 814). It's got an amazing resonance of bass for something of its size. I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that the guitar has a walnut body. Plus there are some cool (some people might think them cheesy) ornamental details on the instrument.

I've played this guitar about 4-5 times, and every time I go to Elderly to try out more guitars, this is the first and last one that I play. I even felt a little jealous yesterday when someone else had clearly played the guitar recently (tuned it to dropped D ... might be the same guy whose been playing all the Collings guitars which were all tuned to dropped D ... ) If there's one thing that is a 'shortcoming' on this particular guitar is that the neck meets the body at the 12th fret, which makes playing up the neck a little difficult.

This particular guy is on consignment at Elderly and I'll keep playing him until someone decides to take him home. I'll never have the moolah to buy him, even though at 5 000 bucks, it's about 2 000 dollars cheaper than placing an order with the Froggy Bottom guys.

Left: Cool biplane painting design on the heel cap. Froggy Bottom gets an artist to do individualized designs for each of their guitars.

Right: And the neat Froggy Bottom logo!

Colonialism, alive and well in Singapore

Our little island home in the sun doesn't get mentioned much in the NYT (and unless terrorist suspects escape with greater frequency, I doubt there'll be another mention soon). But tucked away in the Home and Lifestyle section, here's an article. I've put points of interest in red, and my brief rant follows the article.

In Singapore, a House Steeped in Tradition
By SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP
SINGAPORE

As they planned their family’s move to Singapore from Rowayton, Conn., Jill and Andrew Pickering imagined living in one of the island’s traditional colonial-era homes, with their distinctive black-and-white exteriors and sprawling gardens.

“It is really a quintessential Singapore experience to live in one of those grand old houses surrounded by nature,” Mrs. Pickering said. “You can live in a condominium anywhere, but these houses are really unique.”

Wanting to “get the lay of the land” in this city-state, which has a population of 4.5 million, the couple started out in a centrally located condominium. But after five years, they thought it was time to begin the search for their dream home.

They had been looking for five months when Mr. Pickering, a senior executive at an international shipping company, was biking in one of the historic areas and noticed that renovations had just started on what looked like a long-abandoned house. He immediately called for an appointment to view it, and the family moved in two years ago.

“The house had been empty for six years and the first time we saw it, it was like ‘Jumanji,’ ” Mrs. Pickering recalled, referring to the Robin Williams film about jungle creatures running riot. “There were bats everywhere, all sorts of overgrown lichen and monitor lizards. It was all jungle.”

Despite the rent of 17,000 Singapore dollars ($12,470) a month, recently increased to 22,000 dollars ($16,140), the Pickerings were taken by the size of the living space: 7,200 square feet spread over a two-story main house and a small cottage. The couple and their two girls, Olivia, 18, and Lucy 14, sleep in the house, while their 15-year-old son Harry uses the cottage, which originally served as staff quarters.

Ku Swee Young, a real estate agent with Savills, says rental prices for high-end properties in Singapore have been increasing by an average of 20 percent a year in the last couple of years. Depending on location, a three- to five-bedroom luxury condominium unit rents for 16,000 dollars to 30,000 dollars ($11,730 to $21,990) a month, while houses can range from 7,000 dollars ($5,130) a month, for a two-story terrace house, to 45,000 dollars ($33,000), for a bungalow on a large lot.

The family’s main house, which dates from the early 1910s and sits on top of a small hill, is reached by a long private driveway that ends under a porte-cochère. The house, which is only one room deep, was designed along a linear plan, with rooms opening into one another through tall, graceful archways.

“These houses were designed so that direct sunlight would not come into the house to heat it up,” Mrs. Pickering said. “But because it’s only one room deep with windows on both sides, they’re actually quite bright. They’re very nicely designed and are ideal for entertaining.”

After a small entrance hall, visitors step into a 13-by-25-foot reception room that then leads to the living room, dining room, breakfast room and kitchen. At the end of the house, two smaller rooms serve as a studio for Mrs. Pickering, who is a decorative artist, and a bedroom for their live-in housekeeper.

While the wood floors and high ceilings are typical features of black-and-white houses, the Pickerings’ home includes some unusual features, like exposed red brickwork on the house’s upper facade and tall arched windows on the ground floor that open onto a large terrace with a swimming pool.

Upstairs, a large landing area serves as a family room; each of the three large bedrooms has a balcony, walk-in closet and bathroom. “Black-and-white houses usually have huge bedrooms, but they don’t have many,” Mrs. Pickering said. “I’d love to rebuild this house in another country, because I love its proportions and how it flows. But I would definitely reconfigure the upstairs to have more rooms.”

Mold and bugs are probably the house’s two biggest problems; there is a need to be vigilant about termites and cleaning up after the geckos, she said. “There’s also always something breaking. Because the lightening protection is not sufficient for the number of direct hits we get, we’ve gone through two computers, a hard drive and two TVs.”

The Pickerings’ is one of 33 black-and-white houses around the Mount Pleasant area; there are similar pockets elsewhere in the city. The houses are magnets for expatriates but unloved by Singaporeans, for whom they have sinister associations. “Some of the more senior taxi drivers don’t like to come here at night,” Mrs. Pickering said. “These houses were taken over by the high command of the Japanese military during the Second World War, and some Singaporeans believe they’re haunted.”

Family members have not felt any ghostly presence, but they have had plenty of encounters with unusual creatures: fruit bats, hungry monkeys looking for food in the kitchen, cobras slithering around the garden and even the occasional meterlong monitor lizard.

“When we first moved in, the gardener killed a snake as it was in the process of eating another one; it was, ‘Geez, two in one go, great!’ ” Mrs. Pickering said with a laugh, adding that her neighbor recently found a 4.5-meter (15-foot) python in her garden that took five men to get rid of.

Not all of the garden creatures are threatening, though. The sprawling 130,000-square-foot area, which is full of mature Tembusu and Albasia trees protected by a local heritage designation, is host to some beautiful birds. “We get exquisite kingfisher birds of the most gorgeous turquoise blue that come sitting on the railing of the swimming pool every single day,” Mrs. Pickering said.

“Singaporeans usually don’t like this type of home. They don’t like the jungle, the dark and the bugs. But at some point, I believe they will realize having nature like this is the ultimate luxury in this world.” [End of Story]

Classic colonial discourse: natives / locals don't value what is 'theirs', or are too caught up in superstition and fear to explore the wonders of their own home (CF Passage to India). But the piece obscures the fact that 1. Singaporeans aren't "into" colonial houses because they're just too damn expensive (22 000 bucks!) for any Singaporean to even get near! With a median household income of less than 4000 bucks, and a huge income gap causing more than 90% of Singaporean households to be below the 'average' income (see this), surely the material fact of the matter shouldn't be mystified by exotic stories about low-wage earning taxi drivers being afraid of the ghosts of Japanese soldiers and the people they murdered ...

, and 2. that the Pickerings are merely replicating colonial structures of economic oppression -- I'm assuming that they're in Singapore being paid big bucks for a job ("senior executive at an international shipping company") that a Singaporean could do, and probably does, for much less ...

Still, for a chance to see the interior of a house you'll never otherwise see --
click here

Higgledy Piggledy

Owing to a discussion early this morning about metrical forms, I was just perusing various wikipedia entries on the subject and came upon this: the "higgledy piggledy". It's an invented verse-form involving double dactyls. (A dactyl is simply a foot of verse that has one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones). Here are the conditions:

1. There are two stanzas. Each stanza is made up of four lines. Each of the first three lines must be double dactyls. The fourth line is a dactyl plus a single accented syllable.

2. The first line must be repetitive nonsense.

3. The second line of the poem MUST introduce the subject via a proper name.

4. One of the lines of the second stanza must contain a single word that is a double dactyl.

5. The final words of each stanza must rhyme.

Of course, I couldn't resist ... So here's my "higgledy piggledy" to my recent obsession: banjo playing ... (with fully annotated commentary of course ...)

Bum-ditty, Bum-ditty*
Gary the Quick-Fingered#
Frailed on his banjo all
Throughout the night.

Edna who loved him but
Hating the twinging twang
Unceremoniously*
Turned off the light.#

*The "bum-ditty" stroke is the basic stroke in clawhammer style banjo -- which is what I'm currently trying to play!
# I wish ...
* That's actually one of Edna's favorite words!
# Nothing of the sort has happened. Edna's been really supportive of my banjo playing!

I live near morons ...

One of the things I take pleasure doing is calling the police on my unruly neighbors. But I guess the police are always on top of things here in the land of stupid white kids partying when they should be studying. True to the reputation of MSU undergrads (Go State!) as moronic party freaks, there was a big party that turned into a riot over the weekend. The partying began at an apartment complex just off campus and the crowed swelled to about 4000.

Here's some video:

Luck of the Draw

Having never won anything in a lucky draw, raffle or even a table prize in one of those staff dinners, I was most irritated to receive the following this morning and thus have embellished it with my petty comments:

Dear Sir,

VERIFICATION OF OVERSEAS STATUS

1. On your application, an electronic Exit Permit (eEP) no. IAT 6863, valid from 02/08/2007 to 01/08/2010 for the purpose of your overseas study in USA ["for study in the USA" would be clearer as it gets around the passive construction and still sounds bureaucratic], was issued to you.

2. We are conducting a routine random verification exercise [never win lucky draw can get picked for this kind of thing ...] and you have been selected [as one of 2 lucky winners of an all expense paid trip to climb Peng Kang hill ... ] by our system to furnish documentary proof of your current overseas status [again, "proof that you are currently overseas" would be less clumsy].

3. Please let us have an updated documentary proof ["an" is wrong] certifying the purpose of your overseas stay [Re-write as: "Please let us have a document explaining why you are overseas". I should think that "certification" can't refer to a "purpose" but to the legality of my current status, something which the system already has, since it approved my permit] such as a company letter stating the duration of overseas employment [I think they should have more than one form letter for this, since point one already acknowledges that I applied for the permit "for the purpose of my overseas study in the USA"] with the name and designation of the signatory or a properly endorsed school letter stating the level and full duration of your course. You may email or fax the relevant document(s) to us at 63733173, within 1 month from the date of this letter. [of course, this being MINDEF, there isn't a date on the letter] Thank you.

4. Should you require clarification, please contact the Exit Permit Office at 63733136/38/39 or the MINDEF eServices Centre at +65 65676767, if you are calling from overseas [from "a location overseas" would be more correct, though I will concede that in Singaporean English "overseas" has become a proper noun, in the same way that outremer was the shorthand reference to the Crusader Kingdoms in Medieval Europe] , or [a semi-colon would correct the run-on: "overseas; or,"] 1800-3676767 (1800-eNSNSNS), if you are calling in Singapore.

Yours faithfully, [I'm glad you're still faithful ...]

Susan Woo (Mdm)
NS Registration & Enlistment Centre (NSREC)
Tel : 6373 3139
Fax : 6373 3173

Given that Susan Woo (Mdm) probably didn't write the standard letter and NS
clerks did, it really isn't her fault ...

Sounds and Sweet Airs

I've been listening, quite obsessively, to the British hymn "I Vow to Thee My Country". I've mentioned the hymn in connection to a fabulous movie ("Another Country") on the blog some time back but I've most recently revived an interest in the hymn because it moves me in ways that make me suspicious and worried about who (or what) I am.
Ok, this basically means that listening to the hymn makes me teary. Earlier this week, as I listened to it on YouTube, I was just downright weepy. Here's the version that moved this hard heart as well as the lyrics:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,

Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;

The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,

That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;

The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,

The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,

Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;

We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;

Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;

And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,

And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

Now, what intrigues as well as irritates me, is how such a nationalistic hymn of jingoism that subordinates choice and freedom to that old lie and masks imperial ambition as obedience to a higher call moves me to tears. Even if the imperial ambitions of the hymn are outmoded the comments on the YouTube video attest to the fact that the hymn stirs lots of feelings of patriotism. (I even saw a comment on another video of the hymn that said "we will have the empire again ... "). An old verse that is now no longer included in hymnal versions of the song underscores the virulent and violent nationalist sentiment that the existing verses make very little effort of concealing:

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,

Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.

Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,

And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.

I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,

I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

The use of the hymn in the film Another Country is smart precisely because it questions the values of sacrifice in the name of imperial expansion. Yet I also found myself emotionally stirred when the hymn's melody (from Holst's "Jupiter" and also known as "Thaxted") was used at key points of the blatantly propagandistic film Roaring Across the Horizon, a Chinese film about China's superhuman and successful attempts to develop the 原子弹 (do I have that right?) In that film, Holst's theme swells in the background every time the Chinese manage something amazing -- like flattening the uneven, sandy ground of the Gobi desert with huge rollers driven only by raw manpower, calculating with abacuses what the Americans and Soviets could work out only with the aid of computers, and, of course, firing off the bombs.

Adding another dimension to this question of why I am so strangely moved is the fact that Holst's uplifting and majestic theme really comes in the middle of a very different piece of music. The "Jupiter" movement of Holst's The Planets is also subtitled "The Bringer of Jollity" and its opening strides, as well as the rest of the movement really do create a rather light-hearted atmosphere with its quick tempo and playful call-response accents of the woodwinds and brass: some of it sounds like incidental music for an old Western. Placing the sweeping grandeur of this middle section against the frivolity of the rest of the movement conveys a message that is quite different from the hymn's rather straightforward appropriation of the stirring melody. Especially interesting in thinking about the musical context of the Thaxted theme is the way it returns with the low brass toward the end of the movement, gets taken up by the trumpets but then gets shuffled, unresolved, into the rest of the movement's final seconds.(Here's a video of the entire movement).


So, my question revolves around how someone whose developed so many defenses against nationalistic feeling goes to pieces at something so flagrantly 'patriotic'. Worse, it isn't even 'my own country' that we're talking about here but a wholly irrational response to some vague (but nonetheless dangerous) feeling of .... I don't even know what to call it. Perhaps the idea of sacrifice just gets me. I'd be interested to know if anyone else is strangely moved by the hymn and if they can put a finger on why.

Paella!

I finally took the plunge and tried cooking paella last night. I'd been fascinated by the dish since my first encounter with it in a Cuban restaurant in mid-town Manhattan. It was really a slice of heaven -- great tasting rice with sausage and seafood on top, all served in a huge platter. I was further intrigued by the fact that saffron is required to make it, saffron being that really expensive spice. Anyway, the paella I made ended up okay ... not spectacularly flavorful or anything but still something I was pretty pleased with. (And by the way, that glass of pink juice in the background, is grapefruit. It's our drink of choice now since we can get 18 pound bags -- about 20 + grapefruit -- for five bucks ....)

Those burnt bits of rice from the bottom of the pan are supposed to be highly prized .... Given that connection, I now tend to think of paella as a Spanish version of claypot chicken rice. I guess that's one way to navigate around a world of food ....

There we have it -- the world's most expensive spice. I managed to get this one gram jar for about 5 bucks. Which means an ounce of the stuff costs well over 100 dollars ...!