How the hell did it get out though!

Folks much has happened in the intermission. We will chronicle much of it, from Cauvery river to Anna Nicole Smith’s death and Heather Mills’ divorce. From the many tragedies at the Cricket World Cup to a new season of Baseball, also known as year 99 of futility in my home town of Chicago. That would be on the northside of the town.
I want to write longer features and some commentary. Hopefully, more history and literature (including some in Kannada) as well as my usual features on Rajkumar.

I am back.

In the meanwhile, our Hopeful One aka Decider has amazingly emerged as the philologist for the twenty first century. His tortured efforts to explain ‘what torture is’ has been more torturous than his predecessor’s effort to explain the meaning of the word ‘is’.

Anyway, let me admit that I have been a big fan of Aaron Sorkin’s. I liked A Few Good Men and American President (a little), Sports Night (a lot) and The West Wing (way too much). What can I say? I am a political nut. But I like good writing and good dialogue; either on TV or in Hollywood movies good writers and story tellers are a rare breed. Charlie Kaufman is pretty good. So is Sorkin. One can look forward to some good lines, passion and some intelligence.

Studio 60 promises to be good and something to look forward to every monday. In these days of game shows and dumb competitions, mystery dramas and sports shows, rare is the prospect of finding intelligence, quirkiness and good writing on TV. In addition, Sorkin constantly seeks to create a romantic idealism in his shows, be it on politics or entertainment. I like that.

In the same vein, we could expect some very good films too. Personally, I am looking forward to a new flim version of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel. Iñárritu is brilliant and his 21 Grams is one of my favorite films. Babel too promises to be really good.

As I said, something to be excited about.

I was hoping to have a clear sense by now of what I want to write here at the Land of Lime, as opposed to the two other blogs for which I contribute. That was the other reason for the hiatus. I still may not have have a clear sense but I hope to write more serious feature pieces on literature, films and sports here. Obviously, there will be some of overlap between Land of Lime and Revise and Dissent. I will do cross postings in such case.

Now, I am just glad to get back to a writing routine. I am also very glad to be back inside a classroom. It’s just a sense of belonging one has.

ASIDE: apologies for lack of postings. I hope to make amends soon.

Read this news story in the Hindu on training truck drivers, who are being recruited to work in the U.S. Hey, if you can make more than entry level programmers or even assistant professors make, more power to them.

Smooth roads, cabins with plush interiors, well-maintained vehicles, insurance cover, fixed working hours and $4,000 to $5,000 a month. What more could a truck driver ask for?

The infamous Hongkong video, captured by a fellow passenger, has already spawned remixed versions, art, commentary and much else. Eugene Robinson has an OPED in the WAPO that you may want to read:

Internet sensations have a brief shelf life, and “Bus Uncle” doesn’t stand up to repeated viewings. It does make a couple of extremely valuable observations about modern urban life, though.

For one thing, Bus Uncle speaks an unassailable truth: “I face pressure. You face pressure.” We all face pressures at work and at home. We all have deadlines to meet and bills to pay. We handle our pressures because that’s what being an adult is largely about, managing pressures so they don’t end up managing us. But we all have those days, don’t we, when it feels like a losing battle.

And then all it takes is an innocent tap on the shoulder at just the wrong moment. I’m not talking about “intermittent explosive disorder,” which is the clinical term that encompasses road rage. That’s an actual condition that can be treated with therapy and medication. I’m talking about that rare instant when someone inadvertently touches your very last nerve, and Bus Uncle escapes his restraints.

The other lesson from “Bus Uncle” is taught by its very existence. A student sitting across the aisle happened to see the confrontation and decided to record it with the camera in his cellphone, which was able to take still pictures or video. It’s amazing that in nanoseconds, a slice of Hong Kong life can be experienced in Washington, Johannesburg or Moscow.

I don’t feel like recommending you watch this video. It made me feel sick but this is also the sad reality of present day urban life. Something we can not run away from.
I was also reminded of some of our neighborhood fights when we were kids. But that story is for another day.

Although this blog came into existence about ten days, I began posting there from today. I wanted to do a series of entries on the recent Reservations saga both here and at Revise and Dissent but it is such a hard theme to write on. It is indeed a conundrum, since reservations are only part of a much larger package to achieve social justice but we seem to conveniently forget that. Anyway, I took a week to think through some issues and decide on the questions that I wanted to focus on. Today, I posted my first entry there and since many of the issues are familiar to this audience, I will not cross post it here.

OK, some fireworks to be expected on this controversial theme.

But even granting CI its conceit, the second surprise (I’m lapsing into the ranking mode myself) was the relatively huge gap between the four most frequently cited theorists and the rest: Jacques Derrida (177), Sigmund Freud (174), Michel Foucault (160), Walter Benjamin (147). Then we drop down below 100 citations: Roland Barthes (92), Jacques Lacan (80), Fredric Jameson (79), Edward Said (77). Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell ranks at No. 12, tied with Friedrich Nietzsche with 57 citations. The majority of the rest of our most-cited theorists huddle together with more modest numbers to their names. Harvard lit crit Homi K. Bhabha (an editor of CI) ties with Aristotle at No. 27, each with 38 cites; Harvard’s Greenblatt ties with MIT’s Noam Chomsky at No. 80, with 17 cites; Henry Louis Gates Jr. (again Harvard) ties with Friedrich Kittler, a media theorist from Germany, for 57, with 24 cites. Barbara E. Johnson (Harvard) is named but unranked with 12 cites. Once you get past the Europeans, the list is heavily East Coast, heavily establishment, and hardly does justice to what was once the fun of reading CI (although it may indicate what the journal has become in recent years).

But then what is the nature of scholarly engagement with these much quoted thinkers? Waters points out one example that the authors themselves cite:

The authors of the ranking, Anne H. Stevens, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Jay W. Williams, Critical Inquiry’s managing editor, note that “Benjamin’s works are cited nonargumentatively,” which I think is a nice way of saying his ideas are just window dressing, not engaged with. That must be why he ranks high as one of the most perfectly citable authors of all, because you can cite him reverently without having to figure out what he said. With Benjamin a citation is the academic equivalent of the purely ritual move, like a ballplayer’s sign of the cross.

But the genuflecting to Benjamin points, perhaps, to something hocus-pocus about this whole counting exercise.

Here is Waters’ sobering conclusion:

More tragic is the harm such lists do, especially (as Merton speculated) in the humanities, where thinkers tend to mature much more slowly than in the sciences. Such lists harm because they freeze things; they tend to favor those who were precocious young; and they positively discourage the slow-to-mature, causing the system to lose whatever the last people might have contributed. The human cost of such list making is wastage. The learned duplicate unthinkingly the worst behavior of society as a whole, celebrating the celebrities, not even pausing to think about the fruit wasting on the vine, whose cultivation might have benefited us all.

Now I should get back to serious matters, liking quoting significant theorists and agreeing with them.