I first heard of Mary Roach sometime in this past year, when her book Packing for Mars was reviewed by the New York Times. The idea of space travel and an examination on all the details into it, and it’s a book that I’m very much looking forward to reading.
In the meantime, I picked up a copy of Stiff, Roach’s 2003 work that explores cadavers and everything associated with them. Roach has managed to take a rather morbid subject and not only make it interesting and readable, but very amusing at times.
She talks to experts across the world about various topics, including: dissection, autopsies, the various stages of decomposition and how they are used by forensic scientists in crime scene investigations, cadavers and their various uses in medical schools, how bodies helped reveal what happened to TWA Flight 800, ballistics tests fired into gelatin with the consistency of a human thigh and how organ recovery procedures are done. Roach is more than capable of addressing all these issues and supplements them with extensive historical information.
Perhaps the most interesting question is metaphysical. How do we define “death”? Legally, it is most commonly defined as the death of the brain. This creates a problem in organ recovery operations, considering that doctors sometimes have to remove a living, beating heart.
Part of this is a larger, metaphysical discussion about personhood and the concept of a human soul. Are you your body, or are you your thoughts? Which one is more likely to make you who you are and how you choose to identify yourself? I’m reminded of a film that we had to watch once in enrichment called Who is Julia?. At the time, we made relentless fun of the low-quality video and melodramatic acting, but maybe the ethical issues the movie raises will actually be valid in the future. If science someday allows full brain transplants (and perhaps the spinal surgery abilities will also allow transplantees full use of their limbs), what will happen to the recipients? What might happen to a brain put into a new body? Are you still you? How, and to what extent?
“You’re dealing with an operation that is totally revolutionary,” one expert says of a potential human head transplant. “People can’t make up their minds whether it’s a total body transplant or a head transplant, a brain or even a soul transplant” (p. 215).
One thing is for certain though: death does not have to be the end. Roach points out that there are over 80,000 people waiting for organs in the US as of 2003, with 16 of them dying every day (p. 195). The organ recovery which Roach witnessed saw one donor give their heart, liver and kidneys so that three other people could have their lives extended. I can’t think of a more significant gift than that of one’s organs – it is giving a stranger the gift of time.
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
"The Meaning of Love"
"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of the what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true." - Viktor Frankl
I'm not lying when I say that this book changed my life.
I'm not lying when I say that this book changed my life.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Berlusconi’s Italy
Over the past few months, I’ve been making my way through Alexander Stille’s The Sack of Rome: Media + Money + Celebrity = Power = Silvio Berlusconi, which traces Berlusconi’s rise in business to his three stints as Prime Minister. Most of us can agree that the American system of politics is far from perfect, but reading this book gave me an insight into just how broken a system can become.
Rome goes into detail about Berlusconi’s beginnings as a real estate developer in 1960s Milan, which are the beginning of not-so-transparent dealings. From there, Berlusconi enters the fledgling commercialized television industry and continues to build his empire, creating the media group Fininvest in 1978. He added the soccer team AC Milan to his possessions in 1986, which is amongst the most profitable in the world.
A failed system
The book is well-researched and handles the complex legal and social issues so that novices to Italian policy can understand how deeply upsetting Berlusconi’s rule has been. The flaws in the Italian justice and legal system are particularly evident: the huge conflict of interest of a Prime Minister controlling most of the television and newspapers of a country, then getting Parliamentarians elected to create laws effecting this media; the inability of the Italian government to eliminate corruption; the ties between government officials and the Mafia; the statute of limitations in Italian court cases that encourage the accused to drag a trial on for as long as possible to make the statute run out; and the immunity that senators have, causing people to run for political office to avoid trial, just to name a few. It has all the makings of a great political drama once shady alliances and offshore bank accounts come to light (the billions of startup funds for Fininvest have never been identified) and I’m not even going to talk about Berlusconi’s numerous gaffes and a personality that is nowhere near what you would expect from a lead elected official.
Repeat something enough, and it’s true
Television plays an essential role in Berlusconi’s power. He once claimed that, “If something isn’t on TV, it doesn’t exist.” In a country where over 70% of Italians get their “news” from television, this is true. Berlusconi made an effort to turn the public broadcaster RAI into another mouthpiece while expanding his own Mediaset channels to further his agenda. Somehow, this is acceptable.
In the times leading up to one of the elections, opposition figures were faced with a dilemma. Public television is not permitted to show any political advertising, so in order to advertise, they had to give money to Berlusconi’s companies to buy advertising space. They chose not to and were trounced. Technically, public stations are supposed to devote equal amounts of time to the candidates, but the figures were not even close: Berlusconi dominated the airwaves.
In 2001, he also sent “Una Storia Italiana,” to 12 million households, which was a biography mostly in the form of glossy pictures that cost between $25 - $100 million to produce (p. 252). He did this because a law designed to reduce his rule of the media was passed which banned all television advertising for the upcoming political campaign. He circumvented it by publishing and distributing his political history.
Berlusconi is not only active in television but print media, and the book also details how his friends are systematically rewarded and enemies punished using the various arms of his power. Many good editors and news producers have suffered under his tight grasp. Democracy cannot function without a free press, and more and more Italians are rightfully losing their trust in the media because they are told one thing but experience something very different in real life.
Sports and the Collective Consciousness
After Berlusconi bought Milan, the club he followed his whole life, in 1986, the team turned around thanks to huge investments to sign exceptional players. Berlusconi played up the success of his squad and used it for political purposes, indicating that if he could make Milan a successful team, there wasn’t anything else he couldn’t do. He played into cultural narratives that your average Italian could appreciate: a boy buying his childhood team and leading it to glory (oh, did I mention that Berlusconi and his father would bond over their love of AC Milan?), and the power of the national pastime, soccer. Soccer was such a catapult that when Berlusconi formed his political party in the 1990s, he named it “Forza Italia,” which just so happens to be what fans cheering the national team chant. Coincidence? I think not.
That looks familiar
Berlusconi is no isolated political figure. People voted for Berlusconi because of a power vacuum in Italian politics; general disdain for the left; the culture’s general lack of concern for conflict of interest issues and that a large percentage of people are self-employed which sways them to vote conservative (263-265). People voted for him even though he:
“single-handedly derailed the national corruption investigation known as Operation Clean Hands; turned back the clock on the war against the Mafia; set a series of troubling precedents for mixing private and public affairs and created a politicized media that in many ways anticipated developments in the United States and elsewhere” (320).
In a brilliant finish to the book, Skille demonstrates the similarities between Italian life under Berlusconi and American life under Bush and the resurgent right.
Skille’s observations:
1. Because television is critical to political success, money becomes even more necessary. Skille mentions Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, Michael Bloomberg, etc. (328-329). Like Berlusconi, these individuals have money. With enough money political experience is largely irrelevant. This doesn’t seem to create a conflict with voters judging by their choices. Politics is less about being the most qualified and more about having the most money.
2. The role of big business. The US is quick to identify and accuse other governments of corruption, but is it really in a position to judge? Doesn’t it seem strange that the Vice President used to work for Halliburton, the same company that won huge no-bid government contracts? What about the legislators becoming part of the industries they regulated when their political careers are over (340)?
3. Much like Italy, the United States has largely politicized and partisan news media (329). Opinion is repeated enough times to create a fact, combined with all the shouting and fighting disguised as political discourse. No one can agree on what constitute a “fact,” because too many people are busy creating them. John Kerry’s Vietnam record, WMDs in Iraq, whether the US tortures, etc.
4. Noneconomic voters. Inexplicably, white working class voters backed Bush even though they have suffered under Republican presidents. This suggests they are voting on noneconomic issues, such as: “the war on terrorism, gun control legislation, abortion, religion, gay marriage, and the personal appeal of the candidate” (341). It all seems so evident on paper but day-to-day realities are not truly reflected in recent Italian and American elections.
I’d also add that “celebrity” may become the new money. Sarah Palin’s, and to a lesser extent, Christine O’Donnell’s political careers, are dependent upon this celebrity. Palin has done much to keep herself in the spotlight to remain relevant enough when 2012 comes around, but will that matter in terms of actual political experience? Is the American public so enamored with reality TV that they’d elect a president who once had their own show? Perhaps now it’s enough to be a political celebrity to get elected to office. I shudder to think.
And now for something completely different
We can look at immigration patterns and cultural influences and see that Italy and Greece are the focal point of Albanians. Given Greece’s economic problems that they are unwilling to fix, and Italy’s the pervasive corruption and mafia in society and politics, what kind of role models are they for a country that is still developing? And given that the two countries are both in the European Union, how might these factors affect the way Albanians think about their own EU chances?
Rome goes into detail about Berlusconi’s beginnings as a real estate developer in 1960s Milan, which are the beginning of not-so-transparent dealings. From there, Berlusconi enters the fledgling commercialized television industry and continues to build his empire, creating the media group Fininvest in 1978. He added the soccer team AC Milan to his possessions in 1986, which is amongst the most profitable in the world.
A failed system
The book is well-researched and handles the complex legal and social issues so that novices to Italian policy can understand how deeply upsetting Berlusconi’s rule has been. The flaws in the Italian justice and legal system are particularly evident: the huge conflict of interest of a Prime Minister controlling most of the television and newspapers of a country, then getting Parliamentarians elected to create laws effecting this media; the inability of the Italian government to eliminate corruption; the ties between government officials and the Mafia; the statute of limitations in Italian court cases that encourage the accused to drag a trial on for as long as possible to make the statute run out; and the immunity that senators have, causing people to run for political office to avoid trial, just to name a few. It has all the makings of a great political drama once shady alliances and offshore bank accounts come to light (the billions of startup funds for Fininvest have never been identified) and I’m not even going to talk about Berlusconi’s numerous gaffes and a personality that is nowhere near what you would expect from a lead elected official.
Repeat something enough, and it’s true
Television plays an essential role in Berlusconi’s power. He once claimed that, “If something isn’t on TV, it doesn’t exist.” In a country where over 70% of Italians get their “news” from television, this is true. Berlusconi made an effort to turn the public broadcaster RAI into another mouthpiece while expanding his own Mediaset channels to further his agenda. Somehow, this is acceptable.
In the times leading up to one of the elections, opposition figures were faced with a dilemma. Public television is not permitted to show any political advertising, so in order to advertise, they had to give money to Berlusconi’s companies to buy advertising space. They chose not to and were trounced. Technically, public stations are supposed to devote equal amounts of time to the candidates, but the figures were not even close: Berlusconi dominated the airwaves.
In 2001, he also sent “Una Storia Italiana,” to 12 million households, which was a biography mostly in the form of glossy pictures that cost between $25 - $100 million to produce (p. 252). He did this because a law designed to reduce his rule of the media was passed which banned all television advertising for the upcoming political campaign. He circumvented it by publishing and distributing his political history.
Berlusconi is not only active in television but print media, and the book also details how his friends are systematically rewarded and enemies punished using the various arms of his power. Many good editors and news producers have suffered under his tight grasp. Democracy cannot function without a free press, and more and more Italians are rightfully losing their trust in the media because they are told one thing but experience something very different in real life.
Sports and the Collective Consciousness
After Berlusconi bought Milan, the club he followed his whole life, in 1986, the team turned around thanks to huge investments to sign exceptional players. Berlusconi played up the success of his squad and used it for political purposes, indicating that if he could make Milan a successful team, there wasn’t anything else he couldn’t do. He played into cultural narratives that your average Italian could appreciate: a boy buying his childhood team and leading it to glory (oh, did I mention that Berlusconi and his father would bond over their love of AC Milan?), and the power of the national pastime, soccer. Soccer was such a catapult that when Berlusconi formed his political party in the 1990s, he named it “Forza Italia,” which just so happens to be what fans cheering the national team chant. Coincidence? I think not.
That looks familiar
Berlusconi is no isolated political figure. People voted for Berlusconi because of a power vacuum in Italian politics; general disdain for the left; the culture’s general lack of concern for conflict of interest issues and that a large percentage of people are self-employed which sways them to vote conservative (263-265). People voted for him even though he:
“single-handedly derailed the national corruption investigation known as Operation Clean Hands; turned back the clock on the war against the Mafia; set a series of troubling precedents for mixing private and public affairs and created a politicized media that in many ways anticipated developments in the United States and elsewhere” (320).
In a brilliant finish to the book, Skille demonstrates the similarities between Italian life under Berlusconi and American life under Bush and the resurgent right.
Skille’s observations:
1. Because television is critical to political success, money becomes even more necessary. Skille mentions Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, Michael Bloomberg, etc. (328-329). Like Berlusconi, these individuals have money. With enough money political experience is largely irrelevant. This doesn’t seem to create a conflict with voters judging by their choices. Politics is less about being the most qualified and more about having the most money.
2. The role of big business. The US is quick to identify and accuse other governments of corruption, but is it really in a position to judge? Doesn’t it seem strange that the Vice President used to work for Halliburton, the same company that won huge no-bid government contracts? What about the legislators becoming part of the industries they regulated when their political careers are over (340)?
3. Much like Italy, the United States has largely politicized and partisan news media (329). Opinion is repeated enough times to create a fact, combined with all the shouting and fighting disguised as political discourse. No one can agree on what constitute a “fact,” because too many people are busy creating them. John Kerry’s Vietnam record, WMDs in Iraq, whether the US tortures, etc.
4. Noneconomic voters. Inexplicably, white working class voters backed Bush even though they have suffered under Republican presidents. This suggests they are voting on noneconomic issues, such as: “the war on terrorism, gun control legislation, abortion, religion, gay marriage, and the personal appeal of the candidate” (341). It all seems so evident on paper but day-to-day realities are not truly reflected in recent Italian and American elections.
I’d also add that “celebrity” may become the new money. Sarah Palin’s, and to a lesser extent, Christine O’Donnell’s political careers, are dependent upon this celebrity. Palin has done much to keep herself in the spotlight to remain relevant enough when 2012 comes around, but will that matter in terms of actual political experience? Is the American public so enamored with reality TV that they’d elect a president who once had their own show? Perhaps now it’s enough to be a political celebrity to get elected to office. I shudder to think.
And now for something completely different
We can look at immigration patterns and cultural influences and see that Italy and Greece are the focal point of Albanians. Given Greece’s economic problems that they are unwilling to fix, and Italy’s the pervasive corruption and mafia in society and politics, what kind of role models are they for a country that is still developing? And given that the two countries are both in the European Union, how might these factors affect the way Albanians think about their own EU chances?
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The Devil’s Highway
I’ve always been interested in immigration issues, especially as they pertain to human rights. In fact, my first internship was at an immigration law firm. While I’m definitely not lawyer and/or paper pusher material, it provided an interesting insight into very personal stories of what it takes to go to America. Recently, I read Luis Alberto Urrea’s shocking The Devil’s Highway, a book which details a harrowing cross-border trip taken by twenty-six Mexicans to the US through southern Arizona. Only fourteen survived the scorching temperatures as Urrea graphically details what happens to a person who dies of hyperthermia.
I find the growing American xenophobia, fear-mongering and right wing extremism disheartening, and on occasion, terrifying. People have forgotten in the wake of 9/11 panic that we are a country of immigrants and that one of the things that makes America unique is this diversity. Albania is 98% ethnically homogenous; Germany is 88%. The largest ethnic group in the US comes in at 66% of the population.
Maybe I cannot fully understand the situation in the Southwestern United States, but I do understand illegal immigration and the push/pull factors that drive the system: Albania is a perfect example. I asked my host sister how many Albanians she knew that had “illegally left Albania for work in Greece or Italy,” and she told me: “A zillion.” Like Mexican immigrants, Albanians leave to do the grunt work their European Union counterparts refuse to do. Like Mexicans, Albanians have a less elaborate system of “coyotes,” professional guides that escort would-be illegal immigrants over the border for hefty sums. Like Mexicans, Albanians leave mostly for financial reasons. Any complete immigration policy must address these human and economic factors. Living here has allowed me to see how people deal with poverty, broken and corrupt public systems, and an overall lack of hope. Most Americans have no idea what any of these things mean.
I agree with President Obama when he says that our immigration system is “broken.” Firstly, the system is infinitely more complicated than most people are aware of. I feel that the media does not adequately inform the public when it comes to the complexity of the issue.
Probably the largest complaint against illegal immigration is that undocumented workers enter the United States, take American jobs, don’t pay taxes and use social services that they don’t pay for. It’s hard for me to explain how wrong those statements are. In a nutshell: most workers take jobs Americans would refuse to do, they frequently pay taxes in some form, and are less likely to use social services due to fears of deportation. For those claiming they are a burden on the system, consider the costs of rounding up an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants and then deporting them. Wouldn’t it be better to give them amnesty and turn them into taxpayers, since an appeal to human rights isn’t enough by itself? Economically speaking, illegal immigrants contribute to the economy by buying goods and services in their communities. Even if they send money home they still pay bank fees. I think anti-illegal immigrant groups conveniently pick and choose statistics. If Americans want to pick fruit in the sun, let them. If you want to deport illegal immigrants, consider how many people would want to pay $20 for a couple oranges picked by Americans. Illegal immigrants fill an important need in the American economy and should be appreciated for the back breaking and often unpleasant work that they do. It is simply reality: the US benefits greatly from this arrangement and anti-illegal immigrant groups need to stop acting like this is just a taker in this Mexico/US relationship.
What would a new solution to immigration look like? First and foremost, it’s a human rights issue. We are talking about human beings whose only crime is trying to improve their lives by any means possible. They are without any legal standing, meaning that crimes against them often go unreported. Think about how this effects people brought to the US against their will: trafficking victims. Are they supposed to be punished? People, illegal and legal, deserve protection in the eyes of the law. Status shouldn’t be a prerequisite for having rights. We can agree that illegal immigrants have broken a law by entering without the proper papers, but there needs to be a solution based on amnesty. Why should people who have spent ten years here as otherwise model citizens be punished? Some people think that amnesty will increase the number of border crossings, but I think it’s just more fear tactics. A person who can’t feed their family isn’t going to be more likely to chance it just because they may get amnesty. We are talking about people who live day-to-day, something that it’s taken me a long time to understand living in a developing country. People in poverty aren’t thinking about the future, they aren’t thinking about school or the newest shiny gadget like most of us in developed countries do. They are thinking about survival and usually no more than a week in advance. They aren’t going to be reading up on amnesty status before packing a backpack and going into the desert.
A finally, no political discussion can be complete without somehow coming to the topic of terrorism. Given that most of the debate centers around the US/Mexico border, it’s very unlikely that the type of terrorists we are told to be afraid of are crossing this border. I know this is probably scary and amazing, but no border is safe. Ever. The way I see it, we have two options: to be paralyzed with the fear of an imminent attack from people who aren’t white just like us and to regard anyone of foreign extract with suspicion, or to accept the realities of life in 2010, doing what we can to avoid and prevent attacks but otherwise having the courage to live our lives and still feel more love than fear for our fellow inhabitants of earth. I overwhelmingly chose the latter.
“There should be no such thing as an illegal person on this planet.” – Raquel Rubio Goldsmith, advocate for border reforms and more human treatment of the undocumented.
I find the growing American xenophobia, fear-mongering and right wing extremism disheartening, and on occasion, terrifying. People have forgotten in the wake of 9/11 panic that we are a country of immigrants and that one of the things that makes America unique is this diversity. Albania is 98% ethnically homogenous; Germany is 88%. The largest ethnic group in the US comes in at 66% of the population.
Maybe I cannot fully understand the situation in the Southwestern United States, but I do understand illegal immigration and the push/pull factors that drive the system: Albania is a perfect example. I asked my host sister how many Albanians she knew that had “illegally left Albania for work in Greece or Italy,” and she told me: “A zillion.” Like Mexican immigrants, Albanians leave to do the grunt work their European Union counterparts refuse to do. Like Mexicans, Albanians have a less elaborate system of “coyotes,” professional guides that escort would-be illegal immigrants over the border for hefty sums. Like Mexicans, Albanians leave mostly for financial reasons. Any complete immigration policy must address these human and economic factors. Living here has allowed me to see how people deal with poverty, broken and corrupt public systems, and an overall lack of hope. Most Americans have no idea what any of these things mean.
I agree with President Obama when he says that our immigration system is “broken.” Firstly, the system is infinitely more complicated than most people are aware of. I feel that the media does not adequately inform the public when it comes to the complexity of the issue.
Probably the largest complaint against illegal immigration is that undocumented workers enter the United States, take American jobs, don’t pay taxes and use social services that they don’t pay for. It’s hard for me to explain how wrong those statements are. In a nutshell: most workers take jobs Americans would refuse to do, they frequently pay taxes in some form, and are less likely to use social services due to fears of deportation. For those claiming they are a burden on the system, consider the costs of rounding up an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants and then deporting them. Wouldn’t it be better to give them amnesty and turn them into taxpayers, since an appeal to human rights isn’t enough by itself? Economically speaking, illegal immigrants contribute to the economy by buying goods and services in their communities. Even if they send money home they still pay bank fees. I think anti-illegal immigrant groups conveniently pick and choose statistics. If Americans want to pick fruit in the sun, let them. If you want to deport illegal immigrants, consider how many people would want to pay $20 for a couple oranges picked by Americans. Illegal immigrants fill an important need in the American economy and should be appreciated for the back breaking and often unpleasant work that they do. It is simply reality: the US benefits greatly from this arrangement and anti-illegal immigrant groups need to stop acting like this is just a taker in this Mexico/US relationship.
What would a new solution to immigration look like? First and foremost, it’s a human rights issue. We are talking about human beings whose only crime is trying to improve their lives by any means possible. They are without any legal standing, meaning that crimes against them often go unreported. Think about how this effects people brought to the US against their will: trafficking victims. Are they supposed to be punished? People, illegal and legal, deserve protection in the eyes of the law. Status shouldn’t be a prerequisite for having rights. We can agree that illegal immigrants have broken a law by entering without the proper papers, but there needs to be a solution based on amnesty. Why should people who have spent ten years here as otherwise model citizens be punished? Some people think that amnesty will increase the number of border crossings, but I think it’s just more fear tactics. A person who can’t feed their family isn’t going to be more likely to chance it just because they may get amnesty. We are talking about people who live day-to-day, something that it’s taken me a long time to understand living in a developing country. People in poverty aren’t thinking about the future, they aren’t thinking about school or the newest shiny gadget like most of us in developed countries do. They are thinking about survival and usually no more than a week in advance. They aren’t going to be reading up on amnesty status before packing a backpack and going into the desert.
A finally, no political discussion can be complete without somehow coming to the topic of terrorism. Given that most of the debate centers around the US/Mexico border, it’s very unlikely that the type of terrorists we are told to be afraid of are crossing this border. I know this is probably scary and amazing, but no border is safe. Ever. The way I see it, we have two options: to be paralyzed with the fear of an imminent attack from people who aren’t white just like us and to regard anyone of foreign extract with suspicion, or to accept the realities of life in 2010, doing what we can to avoid and prevent attacks but otherwise having the courage to live our lives and still feel more love than fear for our fellow inhabitants of earth. I overwhelmingly chose the latter.
“There should be no such thing as an illegal person on this planet.” – Raquel Rubio Goldsmith, advocate for border reforms and more human treatment of the undocumented.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
It’s a Mental Game
This past week I read The Ponds of Kalambayi. It’s the memoir of Peace Corps volunteer Mike Tidwell, who served in a village in Zaire (now called the Democratic Republic of Congo) in the late 80s. It seems that so many Peace Corps volunteers are either writers or readers; many are both. I enjoy reading stories from other volunteers and comparing and contrasting experiences.
Tidwell worked as a fishing extension agent. During his two year service, he taught Zairians fishing culture. After a rigorous training in the US, he moved to a village close to Mbuji-Mayi in the country’s south central region. Tidwell’s main work involves visiting the men of nearby villages on his motorcycle, scouting out potential areas to dig ponds, instructing them on the digging (often taking 50,000 shovelfuls to get the right size), teaching them how to add the proper compost to the pond and also how to feed the fish. Along the way, he learns about generosity in the form of selfless, community-centric villagers; and the greed of Westerners who exploit the village farmers by forcing them to grow cotton, only for them to buy at low prices, and the exploitative diamond trade in Mbuji-Mayi. While Tidwell was there, a normal Zairian made $170 a year – or the amount of 2 ½ months of Tidwell’s living allowance.
It takes Tidwell along time to convince people. Many villagers think that he will take the harvest of fish. He is, after all, a white foreigner in an Africa that’s always been pillaged by his kind. But he gains the farmers’ trust and eventually ends up running a successful project, no thanks to the corrupt government officials that want a piece of the action. The main point of the project is to give malnourished people a chance at daily protein. Tidwell preaches an ideology of limiting family size as well – something villagers can’t understand. Many village men would rather take the trouble of digging two ponds, if only because that means they can have more children. What Tidwell understands in time after many frustrating discussions is that intentionally limiting family size is of little use when nature does it by itself. He attended over 200 funerals in two years, many of them caused by accidents or otherwise curable diseases.
The part that resonated with me the most comes in the later chapters of the book. In a tiff with the US government, the Zairian government refused to grant any additional visas for new volunteers. Tidwell’s Peace Corps director writes him a letter, begging him to extend for a third year so that a volunteer may remain in the valley and continue the work. Otherwise, it may be years until someone else came to take his space. Tidwell considers it briefly – until he acknowledges his own limits.
Alcoholism is a dark cloud amongst volunteers. The reasons that cause it are almost limitless. If stress is situational, part of me thinks alcoholism could be situational at times, too. Firstly, gender roles and societal expectations come into play in many of the countries volunteers are sent to. In most cases, it’s rude for a male volunteer to refuse a drink. In other cases, drinking is a social event that builds friendships, connects people, and paves the way for future working relationships. “In the beginning I drank to be sociable. I drank for entertainment – to relieve the monotony of village life. But now I was drinking seven days a week… Not by any stretch of the imagination could this be called normal consumption, (p. 254)” Tidwell said.
Alcoholism is also a side effect of depression, or at least serves as a coping mechanism when volunteers feel alone, homesick or frustrated with their work. Tidwell described workless days as such: “These weren’t good days for me. With no work to do, nothing on which to train my mind, I grew restless and depressed. Time seemed to slow down, then stop altogether… By one o’clock, a book tossed aside, I’d feel that tug, that need to do something… (p. 251)” The same reasons caused Tidwell to start drinking far more than he should have, and it was with the knowledge that he was slowly becoming an alcoholic that he decided to decline a third year. All of this supports the often underestimated mental and emotional toll that Peace Corps service takes.
Tidwell worked as a fishing extension agent. During his two year service, he taught Zairians fishing culture. After a rigorous training in the US, he moved to a village close to Mbuji-Mayi in the country’s south central region. Tidwell’s main work involves visiting the men of nearby villages on his motorcycle, scouting out potential areas to dig ponds, instructing them on the digging (often taking 50,000 shovelfuls to get the right size), teaching them how to add the proper compost to the pond and also how to feed the fish. Along the way, he learns about generosity in the form of selfless, community-centric villagers; and the greed of Westerners who exploit the village farmers by forcing them to grow cotton, only for them to buy at low prices, and the exploitative diamond trade in Mbuji-Mayi. While Tidwell was there, a normal Zairian made $170 a year – or the amount of 2 ½ months of Tidwell’s living allowance.
It takes Tidwell along time to convince people. Many villagers think that he will take the harvest of fish. He is, after all, a white foreigner in an Africa that’s always been pillaged by his kind. But he gains the farmers’ trust and eventually ends up running a successful project, no thanks to the corrupt government officials that want a piece of the action. The main point of the project is to give malnourished people a chance at daily protein. Tidwell preaches an ideology of limiting family size as well – something villagers can’t understand. Many village men would rather take the trouble of digging two ponds, if only because that means they can have more children. What Tidwell understands in time after many frustrating discussions is that intentionally limiting family size is of little use when nature does it by itself. He attended over 200 funerals in two years, many of them caused by accidents or otherwise curable diseases.
The part that resonated with me the most comes in the later chapters of the book. In a tiff with the US government, the Zairian government refused to grant any additional visas for new volunteers. Tidwell’s Peace Corps director writes him a letter, begging him to extend for a third year so that a volunteer may remain in the valley and continue the work. Otherwise, it may be years until someone else came to take his space. Tidwell considers it briefly – until he acknowledges his own limits.
Alcoholism is a dark cloud amongst volunteers. The reasons that cause it are almost limitless. If stress is situational, part of me thinks alcoholism could be situational at times, too. Firstly, gender roles and societal expectations come into play in many of the countries volunteers are sent to. In most cases, it’s rude for a male volunteer to refuse a drink. In other cases, drinking is a social event that builds friendships, connects people, and paves the way for future working relationships. “In the beginning I drank to be sociable. I drank for entertainment – to relieve the monotony of village life. But now I was drinking seven days a week… Not by any stretch of the imagination could this be called normal consumption, (p. 254)” Tidwell said.
Alcoholism is also a side effect of depression, or at least serves as a coping mechanism when volunteers feel alone, homesick or frustrated with their work. Tidwell described workless days as such: “These weren’t good days for me. With no work to do, nothing on which to train my mind, I grew restless and depressed. Time seemed to slow down, then stop altogether… By one o’clock, a book tossed aside, I’d feel that tug, that need to do something… (p. 251)” The same reasons caused Tidwell to start drinking far more than he should have, and it was with the knowledge that he was slowly becoming an alcoholic that he decided to decline a third year. All of this supports the often underestimated mental and emotional toll that Peace Corps service takes.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Children of the Revolution
I admit that I don’t know nearly as much as I should about Africa, and that I feel shamed by that. Recently, I read Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu which has piqued my interest in the area.
It is a story of Sepha Stephanos, a man living between two worlds: the Ethiopia that he fled and the American capital he calls home. He runs a store and spends time with two other friends who are also immigrants from Africa. What has become his normal routine for the past 17 years changes when a white woman, Judith, and her daughter move into the neighborhood.
Sepha’s memories of his father, murdered in front of him during the revolution, are omnipresent. The memories of his dead father are far more binding than any contact he has with his mother and brother, alive and back in Ethiopia. Sepha observes the hope that immigration brings versus the reality of immigrant life against the backdrop of urban blight and gentrification. There is a loneliness as someone who is not connected with their home and not connected to their present, and it’s a sentiment that Judith and Sepha both share. But for Sepha anyhow, there is no going home even if he’s not willing to admit it to himself just yet. One gets the feeling that this novel could be very close to a memoir, in its character development and sense of place. It’s such a fragile insight into the human condition and the fleetingness of happiness, as well as the ways that children can penetrate our souls in a way that many adults can’t.
Since I read the book, Ethiopia has been strangely popping up all over, including this article.
It seems like the classic conundrum: “These events are unfolding as billions of dollars in foreign aid pour into the country. Foreign aid is important. It helps needy people, it creates allies for our causes and markets for our products, and redeems some of the damage inflicted on the third world during the cold war. But aid agencies need to ensure that their programs don’t exacerbate the political problems that are keeping people poor in the first place” (Referring to political turmoil in the 2005 elections, the silencing of opposition, and the May 23rd parliamentary elections that will probably be decided in advance).
If there’s one thing I wish development workers and governments would understand, it’s that just throwing money around doesn’t solve anything even if everyone has a price. From my experiences, one of the biggest problems with money is that it is often mismanaged and not handled transparently. So imagine what happens when you have a country like Ethiopia with 90 different ethnic groups and power grabbing in an election year?
And this should go without saying that any hope for a society’s future needs to be based on human rights. Human rights establish safety and alleviate fears. They drive a society forward because they allow people to organize and speak their minds. Traditional powers have a long history of ignoring human rights for a political bottom line, and this is yet another example in the sad history of short-sighted opportunism.
It is a story of Sepha Stephanos, a man living between two worlds: the Ethiopia that he fled and the American capital he calls home. He runs a store and spends time with two other friends who are also immigrants from Africa. What has become his normal routine for the past 17 years changes when a white woman, Judith, and her daughter move into the neighborhood.
Sepha’s memories of his father, murdered in front of him during the revolution, are omnipresent. The memories of his dead father are far more binding than any contact he has with his mother and brother, alive and back in Ethiopia. Sepha observes the hope that immigration brings versus the reality of immigrant life against the backdrop of urban blight and gentrification. There is a loneliness as someone who is not connected with their home and not connected to their present, and it’s a sentiment that Judith and Sepha both share. But for Sepha anyhow, there is no going home even if he’s not willing to admit it to himself just yet. One gets the feeling that this novel could be very close to a memoir, in its character development and sense of place. It’s such a fragile insight into the human condition and the fleetingness of happiness, as well as the ways that children can penetrate our souls in a way that many adults can’t.
Since I read the book, Ethiopia has been strangely popping up all over, including this article.
It seems like the classic conundrum: “These events are unfolding as billions of dollars in foreign aid pour into the country. Foreign aid is important. It helps needy people, it creates allies for our causes and markets for our products, and redeems some of the damage inflicted on the third world during the cold war. But aid agencies need to ensure that their programs don’t exacerbate the political problems that are keeping people poor in the first place” (Referring to political turmoil in the 2005 elections, the silencing of opposition, and the May 23rd parliamentary elections that will probably be decided in advance).
If there’s one thing I wish development workers and governments would understand, it’s that just throwing money around doesn’t solve anything even if everyone has a price. From my experiences, one of the biggest problems with money is that it is often mismanaged and not handled transparently. So imagine what happens when you have a country like Ethiopia with 90 different ethnic groups and power grabbing in an election year?
And this should go without saying that any hope for a society’s future needs to be based on human rights. Human rights establish safety and alleviate fears. They drive a society forward because they allow people to organize and speak their minds. Traditional powers have a long history of ignoring human rights for a political bottom line, and this is yet another example in the sad history of short-sighted opportunism.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Once I started reading this novel by Philip K. Dick that served as the basis for the movie Bladerunner, I couldn’t put it down. I’ve always been interested in how the arts imagine and conceive of the future – especially when it’s a perceived as a dystopia.
The premise is simple: Earth has been ruined by war and a cloud of radioactive dust has caused great destruction. The people that could afford it have gone to Mars (“the colony”). To help them with their relocation, powerful companies have built ever-more sophisticated robots, to the point where they are almost impossible to tell apart from humans. A band of androids has escaped from Mars after killing their masters and it’s up to Rick Deckard to track them down and “retire” them.
In the androids and life on the desolate Earth, we see Dick’s metaphysics. A large part of the book focuses on existence and being and how we define them. The androids look like humans, behave like humans… so much so that only a professional could tell the difference. Some of the androids Deckard encounters are not conscious of the fact that they are androids: the Rosen Association has pre-programmed them with memories; memories that any normal human being would have. Partly because of this, the androids believe they are human. Dick also makes us wonder about what the role of robot in society will be once technology advances that far. Should things that act, think, look and move like humans have the same rights? Is it fair to say that Deckard “retires” them when what he’s really doing is “killing” them in a sense? What separates a human from an advanced android? Is it just flesh?
Dick also asks us to imagine a world void of life, where the appearance of a spider under an abandoned apartment building’s steps is cause for wonder and celebration. What Rick desires most is to own his own, live animal, not the electric sheep that lives on the roof. A popular catalogue with the residents of San Francisco 1992 is Sidney’s, which lists the price and availability of animals. Many of the entries are annotated with an “e,” for “extinct.” People own fake cats, fake birds… all created to so closely resemble actual life that it becomes confusing.
The book doesn’t end on a happy note. Deckard gets what he wants, but it’s short-lived. The androids that were his mission have been retired. The money he spent on a real animal is wasted when an android takes her revenge against him by killing it. And the living frog he thought found… turns out to have a control panel. While Deckard is the hero of the novel, he doesn’t receive a hero’s ending. Maybe it’s the best one can expect in those dark times.
The premise is simple: Earth has been ruined by war and a cloud of radioactive dust has caused great destruction. The people that could afford it have gone to Mars (“the colony”). To help them with their relocation, powerful companies have built ever-more sophisticated robots, to the point where they are almost impossible to tell apart from humans. A band of androids has escaped from Mars after killing their masters and it’s up to Rick Deckard to track them down and “retire” them.
In the androids and life on the desolate Earth, we see Dick’s metaphysics. A large part of the book focuses on existence and being and how we define them. The androids look like humans, behave like humans… so much so that only a professional could tell the difference. Some of the androids Deckard encounters are not conscious of the fact that they are androids: the Rosen Association has pre-programmed them with memories; memories that any normal human being would have. Partly because of this, the androids believe they are human. Dick also makes us wonder about what the role of robot in society will be once technology advances that far. Should things that act, think, look and move like humans have the same rights? Is it fair to say that Deckard “retires” them when what he’s really doing is “killing” them in a sense? What separates a human from an advanced android? Is it just flesh?
Dick also asks us to imagine a world void of life, where the appearance of a spider under an abandoned apartment building’s steps is cause for wonder and celebration. What Rick desires most is to own his own, live animal, not the electric sheep that lives on the roof. A popular catalogue with the residents of San Francisco 1992 is Sidney’s, which lists the price and availability of animals. Many of the entries are annotated with an “e,” for “extinct.” People own fake cats, fake birds… all created to so closely resemble actual life that it becomes confusing.
The book doesn’t end on a happy note. Deckard gets what he wants, but it’s short-lived. The androids that were his mission have been retired. The money he spent on a real animal is wasted when an android takes her revenge against him by killing it. And the living frog he thought found… turns out to have a control panel. While Deckard is the hero of the novel, he doesn’t receive a hero’s ending. Maybe it’s the best one can expect in those dark times.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Foucault’s Pendulum
I remember when the film version of the da Vinci Code for a number of reasons. I remember how my friends and I tried to get tickets for it, only to realize right before the film started that my online ticket purchase didn’t go through, which caused us to high-tail it to the other end of town to catch it in-progress. I remember the trauma I experienced due to Tom Hank’s hair, from which I’m still recovering. And I also remember the backlash at my university’s foreign language department.
I have to chuckle about it now, because it’s a very small but telling example between European and American mentalities. Most of the language staff was composed of Europeans who scoffed at Dan Brown’s simplified style. “Da Vinci Code? Try a real book like Foucault’s Pendulum,” they said. Even the books mirrored the difference between European intellectualism and American simplicity: most obviously simplicity in writing style and content as well as accessibility. Foucault’s Pendulum is an infinitely more difficult and trying read than The da Vinci Code, but the rewards are greater.
The novel, at a bulky 525 pages, definitely counts as something I never would have made time to read at home. At times, you wonder what Umberto Eco, the philosopher, professor, semiotics specialist, aesthetician and author of the book, is doing. The book itself is like one long semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, lesson. Eco overdoes the primary source documents that introduce each chapter and delves far too deeply into people and events that often don’t return. This is something I love about Roberto Bolano, because this technique enriches your reading. With Eco, it just feels like a bombardment of constant figures and facts that disappear as quickly as they appear.
Page after page of background information aside, the plot and characters make it possible to continue reading these hundreds of pages. Three brilliant editors at a small publishing company spend their time reviewing manuscripts largely focused on the occult. In the beginning, these manuscripts are generally pretty ridiculous to them. One day, a mysterious man comes into the office and tells them a story about the Knights Templar and their plan for world domination. It is then that “the Plan” begins: the editors begin putting information into a computer that then scrambles and connects the bits, creating a whole different story about the Knights, secret societies, plots for world power, and the interconnectedness of some of history’s largest figures. All kinds of mysterious characters come out of the woodwork as the Plan becomes less a work of random fiction and more a plausible version of reality. It crosses the line from a man-made creation to an obsession.
Although largely focused on the development of the Plan, Foucault’s Pendulum has a number of themes relevant not only to Italy during and after World War II but also to the world of publishing. All three of the main characters are editors, and one of them in particular is tormented by this fact. In his private writings, Jacapo Belbo agonizes that editors, although they leave a strong mark on published materials, still are not the original authors of what they edit. He is tormented that he cannot produce his own material, but instead must sift through the works of others. That private suffering is part of what makes Belbo the most interesting character in the book. Eco occasionally gives us small glimpses into what makes Belbo Belbo, but I always found myself wanting to explore Belbo more deeply. For one, he laments about being born at the wrong time; a feeling he shares with another editor, Casaubon, who was too late to participate in the upheaval of 1968. Belbo, who was too young to fight in World War II, spends his whole life wondering if he would have been brave enough and made the right decision to fight for the Resistance during the war. He feels that he is a coward, and this self-loathing leads him to his death. I think it is easy to identify and sympathize with Belbo because he is easily identifiable with others of his generation, one that was shaped by the horrors of war. Perhaps it was just me, but as Eco peels the layers off of the Belbo onion, it seems so realistic that you have to wonder how much is autobiographical. Maybe each of the editors, all so different, are all parts of Eco?
What makes the novel so difficult is its scope, which is clearly what differentiates it from da Vinci Code. I took about ten pages of notes just to figure out which end was up, including the following topics: Alex Nevsky; Picatrix; Borges’ Aleph and Golem; Aleister Crowley; Rosicrucians; Marcel Proust; Templars; Sefirah; Saracens; Temurah; Abraham Abulafia; the Piedmont; Tales of Hoffman; Parsifal; Cathars; Kabbalah; Golden Fleece; reliquaries; Alessandro Cagliostro; Caiaphas and the Tetragrammaton. Not even an education could prepare me for reading this book because I had to look a lot of things up. What can be said is that Eco’s knowledge and the information in the book necessitates a very active reading experience, which is already something out of the ordinary in our relatively mindless world.
Favorite quotes:
“Once I know that I can remember whenever I like, I forget.”
“Revealing to me that the thing that I desired, I feared.”
“You spend life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was – full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.”
Next up: The Joke, by that despiser of women, Milan Kundera.
I have to chuckle about it now, because it’s a very small but telling example between European and American mentalities. Most of the language staff was composed of Europeans who scoffed at Dan Brown’s simplified style. “Da Vinci Code? Try a real book like Foucault’s Pendulum,” they said. Even the books mirrored the difference between European intellectualism and American simplicity: most obviously simplicity in writing style and content as well as accessibility. Foucault’s Pendulum is an infinitely more difficult and trying read than The da Vinci Code, but the rewards are greater.
The novel, at a bulky 525 pages, definitely counts as something I never would have made time to read at home. At times, you wonder what Umberto Eco, the philosopher, professor, semiotics specialist, aesthetician and author of the book, is doing. The book itself is like one long semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, lesson. Eco overdoes the primary source documents that introduce each chapter and delves far too deeply into people and events that often don’t return. This is something I love about Roberto Bolano, because this technique enriches your reading. With Eco, it just feels like a bombardment of constant figures and facts that disappear as quickly as they appear.
Page after page of background information aside, the plot and characters make it possible to continue reading these hundreds of pages. Three brilliant editors at a small publishing company spend their time reviewing manuscripts largely focused on the occult. In the beginning, these manuscripts are generally pretty ridiculous to them. One day, a mysterious man comes into the office and tells them a story about the Knights Templar and their plan for world domination. It is then that “the Plan” begins: the editors begin putting information into a computer that then scrambles and connects the bits, creating a whole different story about the Knights, secret societies, plots for world power, and the interconnectedness of some of history’s largest figures. All kinds of mysterious characters come out of the woodwork as the Plan becomes less a work of random fiction and more a plausible version of reality. It crosses the line from a man-made creation to an obsession.
Although largely focused on the development of the Plan, Foucault’s Pendulum has a number of themes relevant not only to Italy during and after World War II but also to the world of publishing. All three of the main characters are editors, and one of them in particular is tormented by this fact. In his private writings, Jacapo Belbo agonizes that editors, although they leave a strong mark on published materials, still are not the original authors of what they edit. He is tormented that he cannot produce his own material, but instead must sift through the works of others. That private suffering is part of what makes Belbo the most interesting character in the book. Eco occasionally gives us small glimpses into what makes Belbo Belbo, but I always found myself wanting to explore Belbo more deeply. For one, he laments about being born at the wrong time; a feeling he shares with another editor, Casaubon, who was too late to participate in the upheaval of 1968. Belbo, who was too young to fight in World War II, spends his whole life wondering if he would have been brave enough and made the right decision to fight for the Resistance during the war. He feels that he is a coward, and this self-loathing leads him to his death. I think it is easy to identify and sympathize with Belbo because he is easily identifiable with others of his generation, one that was shaped by the horrors of war. Perhaps it was just me, but as Eco peels the layers off of the Belbo onion, it seems so realistic that you have to wonder how much is autobiographical. Maybe each of the editors, all so different, are all parts of Eco?
What makes the novel so difficult is its scope, which is clearly what differentiates it from da Vinci Code. I took about ten pages of notes just to figure out which end was up, including the following topics: Alex Nevsky; Picatrix; Borges’ Aleph and Golem; Aleister Crowley; Rosicrucians; Marcel Proust; Templars; Sefirah; Saracens; Temurah; Abraham Abulafia; the Piedmont; Tales of Hoffman; Parsifal; Cathars; Kabbalah; Golden Fleece; reliquaries; Alessandro Cagliostro; Caiaphas and the Tetragrammaton. Not even an education could prepare me for reading this book because I had to look a lot of things up. What can be said is that Eco’s knowledge and the information in the book necessitates a very active reading experience, which is already something out of the ordinary in our relatively mindless world.
Favorite quotes:
“Once I know that I can remember whenever I like, I forget.”
“Revealing to me that the thing that I desired, I feared.”
“You spend life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was – full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.”
Next up: The Joke, by that despiser of women, Milan Kundera.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Brave New World
Brave New World
A debate always raged between my former roommate Josh and I. He would ask me why I didn’t read Brave New World, given that I liked 1984 so much. And I would counter to him: “How can you not have read 1984 if you like Brave New World?” We were in a Mexican standoff for years, but now I can finally claim the upper hand. A few months ago, I read Brave New World and am therefore the winner of the Josh/Sofie books about failed utopias battle.
First off, I kept thinking about how odd the whole book was. Even odder when you consider that it was published in 1932 and Huxley had no idea of the totalitarianism and insanity that was yet to come. I think there are also a lot of parallels and topics addressed in the book that mirror existence in today’s world or the possibilities that could exist in the world of the future.
A few points:
1. Man’s ability to control science and human life renders the idea of a God unnecessary.
2. There is a parallel between the mindless entertainment generated in the technological age and the drug “soma,” which people take to remove themselves from the world.
3. Social conditioning teaches people how to interact with others. They identify and organize themselves into hierarchies based on the social level they were bred into. Isn’t that also similar to class differences?
4. Not only does genetic engineering in Huxley’s dystopia determine social level, but it even determines the jobs that people do throughout their lives. These jobs and classes never change. Isn’t this relevant to today’s seeming lack of social mobility?
5. People are produced in factories, which was one of the most distressing concepts in the book for me. Being “decanted” out of a jar makes family life obsolete and anything referring to it profane. In this world, there is no loyalty or ties to anyone. Not to families, and not to other people. People become products produced in factories; they are created just like the consumer goods that the state wants them to buy.
6. Babies are trained and socially conditioned from a very early age using hypnopedia, or sleep-learning. The learning gives them all the instructions they will ever need in life, and instills passivity and an aversion to learning on one’s own.
7. The emphasis on collective life makes solitude impossible. Those individuals wishing to be on their own are regarded with contempt, because individualistic behavior is strange, even suspect.
8. The situation that created the Brave New World (BNW) sprung from previous wars. The wars were so bad that people were willing to give up anything: tradition, culture, knowledge, love, family for a peaceful existence.
9. In BNW, permanent happiness is the ultimate goal. Happiness is more important to the citizens of BNW than even ideals like truth and beauty. The reason is that truth and beauty are painful.
10. Everything that is old is useless. BNW is a world without the Bible and a world without Shakespeare. These items eventually surface in a powerful man’s library as reminders of what the world used to be like. Contrary to the lack of intellectualism in BNW, these old books have a character that the new and shallow discourse of the BNW doesn’t have.
11. The eternal question of comparison. What is happiness if you have never known sadness? What is hate if you’ve never known love? These dualities mean that understanding one term is impossible without understanding the other. You always need something to compare something else with. Towards the end of the book, John the Savage laments that nothing costs enough in BNW. For example, to have ideas like truth and beauty, you have to be willing to pay for them with an eventual feeling of pain they might cause. Because these two ideals are averted, it renders happiness meaningless.
12. Youth and old age / live and death. BNW is fixated on superficiality and appearances. For this reason, all people are youthful in appearance until sixty, when they die. When Linda comes to BNW, people are appalled at her signs of age. In reality, I’ve always consider signs of aging to signify that you have lived. Whether one’s life has been full of hardships or success, or love and hate, wrinkles and scars are signs that you’ve survived. This idea would never occur to someone in BNW, because aging is profane even if it’s a part of normal human life. Because family and other relations are non-existent, no one mourns and death is seen as something unimportant.
So as the next decade of the 21st century begins, are we any closer to Huxley’s vision of a Brave New World?
We don’t have the feelies or scent organs, but we have television and internet. In BNW, the feelies are movies that you can feel and scent organs are machines that spew scents. They are both forms of mindless entertainment and distractions, largely meant to keep people from thinking and to keep them together in a large group. Now think about things like Twitter and the idiocy of 140 character Tweets or the entire gestalt of Facebook. Is there a connection there? If that weren’t enough, popular television continues to become more and more infantile. Shows about bad children and their nannies; swapping wives or people living on an island. In my opinion, reality television has been the largest step backwards on the public discourse level I’ve seen in my short life (aside from Sarah Palin’s FaceBook page). Why are people watching “reality” on television when reality is right there in their homes? Why spend so much time watching others’ lives when we all have our own? Because it’s meant as a distraction and not meant to provoke thought. It is the most passive of passive experiences and the general public eats it right up. Besides, television has always been less about content and more about selling consumption. In BNW, consumption is embedded in citizens by the state with clever slogans in their sleep training. To that end, what can we say of our own “conditioning”?
We don’t have soma, but we have over-medicated Americans and their doctors that believe the answer to every problem is solved by a pill.
And books? The statistics, and the internet is loaded with them, speak for themselves. A recent article in the German science magazine GEO speculates the end of the book, at least in the format we know it (more on that later). In BNW, books are old and are banned for that reason. Only technical books about the BNW are available, there is nothing that is aged. Literature is a product of the environment where it was generated, and as such, it is timeless. BNW, through its lack of written history, its populace’s willing ignorance, and its subversion of the most basic of human natures (curiosity), is a cultureless world. Given that there are so many similarities between BNW and our current way of life, I tend to be a bit pessimistic and think that in some ways we are headed in the same direction. Will there be a time when we find ourselves in the same line of thinking as the World Controller when he says, “what is aged is no longer relevant, we have these things now.”?
A debate always raged between my former roommate Josh and I. He would ask me why I didn’t read Brave New World, given that I liked 1984 so much. And I would counter to him: “How can you not have read 1984 if you like Brave New World?” We were in a Mexican standoff for years, but now I can finally claim the upper hand. A few months ago, I read Brave New World and am therefore the winner of the Josh/Sofie books about failed utopias battle.
First off, I kept thinking about how odd the whole book was. Even odder when you consider that it was published in 1932 and Huxley had no idea of the totalitarianism and insanity that was yet to come. I think there are also a lot of parallels and topics addressed in the book that mirror existence in today’s world or the possibilities that could exist in the world of the future.
A few points:
1. Man’s ability to control science and human life renders the idea of a God unnecessary.
2. There is a parallel between the mindless entertainment generated in the technological age and the drug “soma,” which people take to remove themselves from the world.
3. Social conditioning teaches people how to interact with others. They identify and organize themselves into hierarchies based on the social level they were bred into. Isn’t that also similar to class differences?
4. Not only does genetic engineering in Huxley’s dystopia determine social level, but it even determines the jobs that people do throughout their lives. These jobs and classes never change. Isn’t this relevant to today’s seeming lack of social mobility?
5. People are produced in factories, which was one of the most distressing concepts in the book for me. Being “decanted” out of a jar makes family life obsolete and anything referring to it profane. In this world, there is no loyalty or ties to anyone. Not to families, and not to other people. People become products produced in factories; they are created just like the consumer goods that the state wants them to buy.
6. Babies are trained and socially conditioned from a very early age using hypnopedia, or sleep-learning. The learning gives them all the instructions they will ever need in life, and instills passivity and an aversion to learning on one’s own.
7. The emphasis on collective life makes solitude impossible. Those individuals wishing to be on their own are regarded with contempt, because individualistic behavior is strange, even suspect.
8. The situation that created the Brave New World (BNW) sprung from previous wars. The wars were so bad that people were willing to give up anything: tradition, culture, knowledge, love, family for a peaceful existence.
9. In BNW, permanent happiness is the ultimate goal. Happiness is more important to the citizens of BNW than even ideals like truth and beauty. The reason is that truth and beauty are painful.
10. Everything that is old is useless. BNW is a world without the Bible and a world without Shakespeare. These items eventually surface in a powerful man’s library as reminders of what the world used to be like. Contrary to the lack of intellectualism in BNW, these old books have a character that the new and shallow discourse of the BNW doesn’t have.
11. The eternal question of comparison. What is happiness if you have never known sadness? What is hate if you’ve never known love? These dualities mean that understanding one term is impossible without understanding the other. You always need something to compare something else with. Towards the end of the book, John the Savage laments that nothing costs enough in BNW. For example, to have ideas like truth and beauty, you have to be willing to pay for them with an eventual feeling of pain they might cause. Because these two ideals are averted, it renders happiness meaningless.
12. Youth and old age / live and death. BNW is fixated on superficiality and appearances. For this reason, all people are youthful in appearance until sixty, when they die. When Linda comes to BNW, people are appalled at her signs of age. In reality, I’ve always consider signs of aging to signify that you have lived. Whether one’s life has been full of hardships or success, or love and hate, wrinkles and scars are signs that you’ve survived. This idea would never occur to someone in BNW, because aging is profane even if it’s a part of normal human life. Because family and other relations are non-existent, no one mourns and death is seen as something unimportant.
So as the next decade of the 21st century begins, are we any closer to Huxley’s vision of a Brave New World?
We don’t have the feelies or scent organs, but we have television and internet. In BNW, the feelies are movies that you can feel and scent organs are machines that spew scents. They are both forms of mindless entertainment and distractions, largely meant to keep people from thinking and to keep them together in a large group. Now think about things like Twitter and the idiocy of 140 character Tweets or the entire gestalt of Facebook. Is there a connection there? If that weren’t enough, popular television continues to become more and more infantile. Shows about bad children and their nannies; swapping wives or people living on an island. In my opinion, reality television has been the largest step backwards on the public discourse level I’ve seen in my short life (aside from Sarah Palin’s FaceBook page). Why are people watching “reality” on television when reality is right there in their homes? Why spend so much time watching others’ lives when we all have our own? Because it’s meant as a distraction and not meant to provoke thought. It is the most passive of passive experiences and the general public eats it right up. Besides, television has always been less about content and more about selling consumption. In BNW, consumption is embedded in citizens by the state with clever slogans in their sleep training. To that end, what can we say of our own “conditioning”?
We don’t have soma, but we have over-medicated Americans and their doctors that believe the answer to every problem is solved by a pill.
And books? The statistics, and the internet is loaded with them, speak for themselves. A recent article in the German science magazine GEO speculates the end of the book, at least in the format we know it (more on that later). In BNW, books are old and are banned for that reason. Only technical books about the BNW are available, there is nothing that is aged. Literature is a product of the environment where it was generated, and as such, it is timeless. BNW, through its lack of written history, its populace’s willing ignorance, and its subversion of the most basic of human natures (curiosity), is a cultureless world. Given that there are so many similarities between BNW and our current way of life, I tend to be a bit pessimistic and think that in some ways we are headed in the same direction. Will there be a time when we find ourselves in the same line of thinking as the World Controller when he says, “what is aged is no longer relevant, we have these things now.”?
Sunday, December 20, 2009
The Shadow of the Wind
A few months ago, the latest addition to the Priscilla Obeada honorary bookshelf arrived. In the package: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (his book 2666 is already circulating the ranks of PC Albania and is now on its fifth volunteer even though it comes in at 1,000 pages and is really three books); Austerlitz by Sebald and finally, The Shadow of the Wind by Zafon.
I first read about Zafon by chance while browsing the NYT’s online literary section. Another volunteer who has crazily similar literature tastes as me, Raino, asked me later that week if I had read it. Once the book arrived and I started it, I couldn’t put it down.
A lot of comparisons between Zafon and Borges have been made. The elaborate and winding plot and biblio-theme are really the only Borgesian elements. Zafon’s book, as Stephen King describes it, is “full of cheesy splendor.” I’m certain that any comparisons can’t possibly be made to the quality of the writing.
Set amongst the backdrop of Franco’s Spain, the overall mood of the book is gloom and darkness. Barcelona is frequently covered in rain and fog. Nature creates the mood and Zafon uses it often. At the center of the novel is a mysterious library of lost books: books that have perhaps only one existing copy left in the world and are guarded from complete extinction. One day a father takes his son, Daniel, to this near-sacred place and allows him to pick his own book to read, love and protect. This singular moment starts of a series of events that stretches into the past and affects the future while bringing countless mysterious people into Daniel’s life as he searches for more information about the author. Who wrote this book? Why have other works by the author been destroyed by a masked man? And why is that same man now following Daniel? Zafon takes his time to tie and untie this knot of a mystery, which is the strongest point of the book: its elaborate and challenging plot is capped off with a flurry of events that finally puts all the puzzle pieces into place.
While he’s certainly no Borges, Zafon certainly creates the character depth and element of mystery that is required to sustain reader interest for the almost five hundred pages of the book. A prequel, The Angel’s Game is now available and I hope to read it soon.
Some of my favorite quotes:
“Those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.”
“…the eternal stupidity of loving those who hurt us the most.”
“It’s funny how we judge other and don’t realize the extent of our disdain until they are no longer there, until they are taken from us. They are taken from us because they’ve never been ours.”
“Memories are worse than bullets.”
“Most of us have the good fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”
I first read about Zafon by chance while browsing the NYT’s online literary section. Another volunteer who has crazily similar literature tastes as me, Raino, asked me later that week if I had read it. Once the book arrived and I started it, I couldn’t put it down.
A lot of comparisons between Zafon and Borges have been made. The elaborate and winding plot and biblio-theme are really the only Borgesian elements. Zafon’s book, as Stephen King describes it, is “full of cheesy splendor.” I’m certain that any comparisons can’t possibly be made to the quality of the writing.
Set amongst the backdrop of Franco’s Spain, the overall mood of the book is gloom and darkness. Barcelona is frequently covered in rain and fog. Nature creates the mood and Zafon uses it often. At the center of the novel is a mysterious library of lost books: books that have perhaps only one existing copy left in the world and are guarded from complete extinction. One day a father takes his son, Daniel, to this near-sacred place and allows him to pick his own book to read, love and protect. This singular moment starts of a series of events that stretches into the past and affects the future while bringing countless mysterious people into Daniel’s life as he searches for more information about the author. Who wrote this book? Why have other works by the author been destroyed by a masked man? And why is that same man now following Daniel? Zafon takes his time to tie and untie this knot of a mystery, which is the strongest point of the book: its elaborate and challenging plot is capped off with a flurry of events that finally puts all the puzzle pieces into place.
While he’s certainly no Borges, Zafon certainly creates the character depth and element of mystery that is required to sustain reader interest for the almost five hundred pages of the book. A prequel, The Angel’s Game is now available and I hope to read it soon.
Some of my favorite quotes:
“Those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.”
“…the eternal stupidity of loving those who hurt us the most.”
“It’s funny how we judge other and don’t realize the extent of our disdain until they are no longer there, until they are taken from us. They are taken from us because they’ve never been ours.”
“Memories are worse than bullets.”
“Most of us have the good fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Chasing the Sea
One of the best things established by PCVs is the library in the Peace Corps office. It is in dire need of organization, but the library has hundreds of books donated by volunteers. And because I can never say no to a book, I now have my own fledging library in my room of books of my own, books from friends, books Priscilla has sent me, and books I’ve borrowed from the library. And when I’m done with all of those, I can start on all the Vietnam books my school’s English-language library has (don’t ask me why).
On my last trip to Tirana, I brought five books home with me. Good thing my host father had bookshelves built into my new room where I’ll be staying, in the family home, for the next year. Having my books near me provides such a comfort and reminds me of home. Maybe “home” is really where my book collection is.
So aside from a Guenther Grass and all those Weisse Massai books, I picked up Chasing the Sea by Tom Bissell. Bissell was a PCV in Uzbekistan in 1996 that ended up ETing (early terminating; or what I call “boomeranging,” which I definitely mean in the pejorative). Even though he only stayed seven months into service, he still managed to write a great book. It’s part travelogue, part memoir, part history, and part adventure story, as he returns to Uzbekistan five years later to examine the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Along the way, he recollects on his terminated service, details Central Asian history and introduces us to a whole set of characters and places that are at once exotic but yet familiar.
What I appreciate most is the parallels I can draw between his experiences there and mine here. I laughed out loud when he talked about how everyone knows where they’re going in Tashkent but no one knows where anything is (uhm, Tirana?!), or when he goes into detail about food preparation, PST and inter-PCV relationships, largely because it all seems so familiar. Part of me also wanted to read this because my first placement was to Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan) and I often think about how different my experience would have been if I went there. This book gives me a lot to think about.
On my last trip to Tirana, I brought five books home with me. Good thing my host father had bookshelves built into my new room where I’ll be staying, in the family home, for the next year. Having my books near me provides such a comfort and reminds me of home. Maybe “home” is really where my book collection is.
So aside from a Guenther Grass and all those Weisse Massai books, I picked up Chasing the Sea by Tom Bissell. Bissell was a PCV in Uzbekistan in 1996 that ended up ETing (early terminating; or what I call “boomeranging,” which I definitely mean in the pejorative). Even though he only stayed seven months into service, he still managed to write a great book. It’s part travelogue, part memoir, part history, and part adventure story, as he returns to Uzbekistan five years later to examine the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Along the way, he recollects on his terminated service, details Central Asian history and introduces us to a whole set of characters and places that are at once exotic but yet familiar.
What I appreciate most is the parallels I can draw between his experiences there and mine here. I laughed out loud when he talked about how everyone knows where they’re going in Tashkent but no one knows where anything is (uhm, Tirana?!), or when he goes into detail about food preparation, PST and inter-PCV relationships, largely because it all seems so familiar. Part of me also wanted to read this because my first placement was to Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan) and I often think about how different my experience would have been if I went there. This book gives me a lot to think about.
Monday, August 10, 2009
2666
At the beginning of this blog, I said that I wanted to make this not just about my experience in Albania but also a wider range of topics. Unfortunately I’ve gotten away from that. It’s probably because I spend a small fraction of my time on the internet or on television and my access to information has changed my routine thought patterns accordingly.
Last night, I had a dream that I was talking about an author, Roberto Bolano. His final book, published posthumously, has devoured my thoughts for the last two months. Apparently it’s so embedded in my subconscious that I’m giving lectures in my sleep.
I was introduced to Bolano in a Latin American fiction class I took my pre-junior year of university. In my obsession to achieve the “perfect schedule,” (classes all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the rest of the week free) I took a random elective that fit into the schedule. Like many classes, it fit my schedule and was something I knew nothing about. And like the best professors, you find yourself thinking about them and their classes years later. It’s only with the passage of time that you can truly appreciate the gift that they have given.
Since then, I’ve read a few other pieces of Bolano’s work and learned more about this life and the world he created in his writings. “Ambitious” is certainly one adjective that comes to mind. 2666 was certainly a high note to go out on; one that would have been difficult to top. It’s a huge web of settings and characters, all touched by the spider Santa Teresa (a fictional Ciudad Juarez). Bolano creates a profound sense of desolation, as wide as the desert where the bodies of women continue to be found and as hopeless as the search for justice that organized crime, societal ambivalence, police corruption and overall governmental ineptitude prevent.
Some favorite quotes, amongst many:
“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best.” “Yes,” said the voice, “but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.”
“Only in chaos are we conceivable.”
“It has nothing to do with belief… it has to do with understanding, and then changing.”
Last night, I had a dream that I was talking about an author, Roberto Bolano. His final book, published posthumously, has devoured my thoughts for the last two months. Apparently it’s so embedded in my subconscious that I’m giving lectures in my sleep.
I was introduced to Bolano in a Latin American fiction class I took my pre-junior year of university. In my obsession to achieve the “perfect schedule,” (classes all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the rest of the week free) I took a random elective that fit into the schedule. Like many classes, it fit my schedule and was something I knew nothing about. And like the best professors, you find yourself thinking about them and their classes years later. It’s only with the passage of time that you can truly appreciate the gift that they have given.
Since then, I’ve read a few other pieces of Bolano’s work and learned more about this life and the world he created in his writings. “Ambitious” is certainly one adjective that comes to mind. 2666 was certainly a high note to go out on; one that would have been difficult to top. It’s a huge web of settings and characters, all touched by the spider Santa Teresa (a fictional Ciudad Juarez). Bolano creates a profound sense of desolation, as wide as the desert where the bodies of women continue to be found and as hopeless as the search for justice that organized crime, societal ambivalence, police corruption and overall governmental ineptitude prevent.
Some favorite quotes, amongst many:
“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best.” “Yes,” said the voice, “but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.”
“Only in chaos are we conceivable.”
“It has nothing to do with belief… it has to do with understanding, and then changing.”
Monday, March 9, 2009
2666
Admittedly, I don't spend much time doing research about new books as I would like. Then again, I don't have too much faith in a lot of the new arts for a few reasons that I'm not going to go into in this post. At any rate, there's been a lot of buzz for the novel 2666 by the Chilean author Roberto Bolano.
I hadn't come in contact with Latin American fiction until I took a class on the subject, at random, during my pre-junior year at university. Although I focus mainly on German and Eastern European literature, those of us who have put off Latin fiction for too long are really missing a treasure chest.
During the class, we read one of Bolano's books (Distant Star). I read Last Evenings on Earth on my own. Bolano's interesting life really made me want to experience his work. I know that I've only scraped the surface.
2666 will be a more active read at most, which intrigues me. It involves a lot of things that the average reader dislikes: an English translation tallying 900 pages, five different sections with multiple story lines, and many different but somehow connected characters. These are all things that I enjoy because they are rarely as well received as they are in this book, Bolano's final work.
I hadn't come in contact with Latin American fiction until I took a class on the subject, at random, during my pre-junior year at university. Although I focus mainly on German and Eastern European literature, those of us who have put off Latin fiction for too long are really missing a treasure chest.
During the class, we read one of Bolano's books (Distant Star). I read Last Evenings on Earth on my own. Bolano's interesting life really made me want to experience his work. I know that I've only scraped the surface.
2666 will be a more active read at most, which intrigues me. It involves a lot of things that the average reader dislikes: an English translation tallying 900 pages, five different sections with multiple story lines, and many different but somehow connected characters. These are all things that I enjoy because they are rarely as well received as they are in this book, Bolano's final work.
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