Recent Obits, Esq. March 2009

Perks, 4200 years old, Are Dead

Perks, the free goods or privileges that workers receive in addition to a salary, died Saturday. They were 4200 years old. The cause was Glenview Graphic Design's announcement that the weekly "Wednesday's Bagels and Brainstorm" meeting would now be known as "Wednesday's Big Brainstorm."

Perks were born in Assyria, where indentured servants were allowed to eat leftover scraps of roasted pig without fear of execution. They led a long and vigorous life that included free trips to the Bahamas, half off at the local Denny's, expense accounts at strip clubs, and the occasional $6000 shower curtain. But perks became gravely ill during the 2008 subprime-mortgage crisis. The "Bagel and Brainstorm" meeting had already suffered a loss of orange juice and chive cream cheese before the bagels themselves were eliminated.

Perks are survived by baseline salaries and some bathroom privileges.

Citizen Green

I stumbled on this signpost in the carpark of a local supermarket and was utterly taken aback. I admit I was also highly irritated, which is why I took the photo: I wanted to figure out why I was so annoyed. 

On the spectrum of support for the environment and green economy, I confess to being a quiet and sometimes unsmiling participant. This is not because I don't care. I have lived in tropical climates where it's impossible not to be filled with awe at the scale and intensity of weather phenomena. In particular I remember a cyclone that hit Bombay when I was eight. It brought winds that toppled gigantic palms flat on the ground, and wrought such an furor in the ocean (across from which we lived) that waves surged over the cliffs and onto the streets, casting a spray of water that rattled like gunfire on our windows. I've also been lucky enough to live in calmer green surroundings--homes bordered by thickset pines and woods, gardens that housed anything from jasmine and wild orchids to blue plum and pear trees. 

I even had early stirrings of activism. At 10, I wrote a blistering letter (one thesaurus word after another) to the local supermarket, admonishing them for the mass production of plastic bags--all this because I learned that when cast into the ocean, plastic bags confused and occasionally choked sea turtles to death! As an adolescent I came to worship Wordsworth, and wrote a series of appalling poems about dryads and wanderers in the forest. I pressed and classified flowers, and even thumbed through a tantalizing book called "The Amateur Naturalist."

So why now am I not a green citizen?

Because of what the parking sign represents: that it's not enough to just be eco-friendly. Now there's a hierarchy of consciousness and a meritocracy based on eco-performance. I can't park my hand-me-down SUV near the entrance to the market not because it's reserved for the disabled, but because someone arbitrarily decided that the fact that I can't afford a hybrid is worth being penalized. Things like this make you feel permanently, exhaustingly negligent--it's not enough to get your groceries in a cloth bag, print double-sided, buy halogen bulbs; you have to have a Prius too! When did the process of encouraging civic duty mutate into a caste system that excludes and shames the majority?

The problem with being green is that it seems you can't just be; it has to shoot out of your pores. Every environmental "activist" who turns me off is of the proselytizing variety. It's not even as though they're full of self-congratulation; in fact, they're depressingly intent on fetishizing their tiniest consumption. If this bleak approach were the means to inspiring people, we'd have seen the results by now. I don't see people across the nation lining up for compost heaps and 60-second showers just because someone tells them that's the right way to live. 

From a marketing angle, this - here I return to the parking sign - can only work for a fixed population. What happens is that people who already belong to a subsect of the populous - mostly financially solvent folk who can afford to eat and live organic - are reaffirmed in their decision-making, value systems and mode of expenditure. The supermarket targets a specific customer and pats them on the back. It's a tactic to keep your consumer base loyal and to make them feel valued. On that level it works, though I wonder if someone who's chosen the organic route needs increased incentive?

On another level, where I blunder in, this is not a way to motivate people outside the core audience. It can only incentivize being what you already are: the owner of a hybrid. Else you're suddenly a second-class citizen. And in this particular economic moment, any eco-friendly person like myself is also a cost-conscious person--and therefore worried about how to get by without a salary bump, how to eat healthy and save money, how to manage insurance bills. I'm not in a place to create the kind of lifestyle change that involves $7 organic raspberries, let alone the price of a 'preferred parking' spot. 

I suppose it's interesting that in the face of what I call flag-waving 'green' rhetoric, my defense is equally high-flown. I am not perfect and although I do more in the way of integrating energy-saving solutions and care for the environment into my life than ever before, I could always go one step further. But my point is simply that people are awake to the world around them. They see the damage they've wrought and inherited, and make gradual, calibrated decisions to alter their lifestyles and to practice new consciousness. The green revolution is alive and important; I just wish we could live it without needing to see who's shouting the loudest from the rooftops. 

The Dollhouse

Last night I saw the animated movie "Coraline," directed by Henry Selick. In case you consider this another shiny happy kids' movie, beware: the dolls are spies, there's a mother who preys on her children, and even the talking cat is mangy. 

Coraline is charming and sinister all at once - part of a wave of gothic (horror) animation squired by Tim Burton and his peers. Unlike your average Disney/Pixar fare, they give prominence to the subtle presence of evil in the world, integrating sins such as gluttony and curiosity to disturbing effect. I rarely laugh during these movies because I've noticed the trick of the filmmakers to shift from funny to strange and uneasy just as I'm drawing breath from my first chuckle. In contrast to the Disney movie, the real drama of these animated stories takes place beneath the surface of dancing images. 

As if to corroborate, there were no children whatsoever in the theatre. My guess is that a psychological subtext wards off cautious parents. But to be fair, "Coraline" brings the menaces up front: if she doesn't rescue the souls of three children and save her parents, she will have buttons sewn onto her eyes and be trapped in the "Other World" she has wandered into. The threat is manifest to ghastly effect on her accomplice, whose glass-button eyes hover over a mouth pin-tucked into a permanent smile.

Again, the physical damage is just the tip of the iceberg. We are invited to imagine the pain of these horrific surgeries, but Selick underscores what it would actually mean to lose your eyes, to lose the ability to smile or frown at your own volition--it's free will, as much as the ability to express emotion, that Coraline has to fight to retain. 

To my mind there's a clear difference between the fear factor of Cruella Deville the animated character and C.D. as played by Glenn Close. With no disservice to Ms. Close, the cartoon is by far the more terrifying. 

For all their effects and lifelike qualities, animated movies still prompt us to enter the world imagined. It's a place where characters have long spindly fingers that belong in our nightmares, where the crescent moon looks sharp and menacing, and the forest is a den of darkness and danger. An evil character in the flesh invites our compassion - here too is a soul suffering the burdens of mortality, of bad parenting, of social anxiety, of psychological decay. With animated figures we have no such braille with with to decipher the nature of good and evil. 

One final point I'd like to make is that it struck me in watching "Coraline" that most gothic/horror movies in the adult world result in characters fleeing evil. I have strong visual of women running from slashers, of people struggling with doorknobs, and screams in the woods as handheld cameras jostle forward. In this movie I sat in stock terror, wondering how an 11-year-old was going to save not only her parents but three children from the "Other World." The wonderful thing about Coraline the character is that she's so full of pluck. "Be brave, Coraline," she encourages herself; or "come on, Coraline!" at a moment of panic. How many times do we see a character teach herself to be brave?

To watch her I was in awe of how beautifully the filmmakers handle their protagonist: they present a chatty, inquisitive child who learns the price of following her imagination too far, and then they enable us to witness her resilience and ingenuity in saving both herself and those she loves. Of course there's magic and helping hands along the way, but the cleverness of it all is that there's a lot of common sense too. In fact, as Selick reminds us, it's common sense and pluck that can free Coraline - and us - from the pull of a destructive imagination. 

McCulture Part II

I want to pick up the thread of my response to Aviya Kushner's article (see below). As a fellow immigrant, dual-citizen, expatriate what-have-you, I find it interesting to learn of other foreigners' interpretations of America. Some remind me of myself.

For most of my life I defaulted to deriding the cultures around me; perhaps because I thought that to be an immigrant was to be permanently defensive. I balked against the "stiffness" of Londoners, laughed at the Filipino fervor for America, and chafed at the unsophisticated tones of my South Asian family. But I also did strange things to adapt. I modified my accent from Indian to British to American and back to British, always aware of the choice between assimilation and being an outsider. As a 9 year old in London I was mocked for my thick, lilting Indian accent--and to this day I remember the precise moment when I imitated a classmate's pronunciation, and the laughter finally stopped. As of that moment my verbal performance was permanent.

As an adolescent relocated to America, the social pressures changed. I came at a time when "diversity" was still a catchphrase in the suburbs, when my private school celebrated a club called "Students of Color," and the admissions representative praised my "different background" as an asset to the student body. I look back and often wonder how I bore up under this designation.

I appreciate where Kushner is coming from when she talks about ethnicity gone "lite." She's right, but she neglects to account for the fact that ethnicity gets modulated only when it's seen as a burden. An immigrant from Korea expects to be treated - and often is - differently than an immigrant from France. The Korean prepares to sand down the rough edges of their abandoned culture: the unfamiliar accent, cuisine, codes of social behavior. The Frenchman arrives, knowing that to be 'European' connotes urbanity and sophistication, that it is an aspiration for many Americans. Which immigrant do you think goes "lite"??

There is one final point I'd like to address about Kushner's piece. I'll leave aside the fact that I agree - strongly and admiringly - with her stance on the need for more translation, for greater and more immediate access to the wealth of cultures around America. She gets it right when she notes that publishers are limited by the weak appetite of the American reading public for the work of foreign writers. 

But what I want to talk about is her comment on American students abroad, which struck me as astonishingly accurate. I'd like to quote what she says so that it's fresh on the page:

<< It is not that Americans lack curiosity of any ­kind—­but that we seem to lack the right kind. Europe is overrun with young American tourists. Unfortunately, these college students tend to pack a dozen countries into a month or less. They often tote guides such as Let’s Go, which highlight the greatest hits and cheapest places and are written by, you guessed it, other American college students. That’s how we seem to read international literature as well. Let’s go, we might say, but let’s go easy. And ­cheap.

I remember taking the placement exam for foreign students at the Sorbonne in 1994. The registration desk was staffed by several ­well-­coiffed Frenchwomen. The giant exam room was crammed with very thin European students: Italians, Swiss, Germans, some British, and only a handful of Americans. Yet plenty of American college students were studying in Paris. There were entire dormitories full of them. These students went to ­all-­American programs, often run by prestigious universities. They went to French class, sure, but their classmates were American; they lived with other Americans, and so missed out on bathroom French, kitchen French, and get-out-of-my-way-I’m-getting-ready French, which I learned from my French roommate, Stéphanie, in an international ­dorm.

What is going on in our reading habits is that we want to know, but we want to go home at night to an Anglophone dorm, instead of negotiating with a French-speaking neighbor to stop cooking that ­awful-­smelling thing at 3 am. We want someone to address us directly, to write something just for us.>>

I cite this because I've lived through this experience and long wondered why I found it so troublesome. As a child I was toted from country to country under the sheltering aegis of my nuclear family, and as a result, was rarely engaged with my surroundings. But in college I determined to travel to France on my own, desirous of saying that I once "lived in Paris," desperate not to be left behind while friends scattered across Europe.

And yet, when people ask about my time abroad, I find it difficult to tell them what they want: that it was the greatest decision I made, that Paris was epic, the cuisine memorable and the women so chic!...that I read Hemingway and went to Prague and Dublin on the weekends, and met students from San Diego en route. That just wasn't my experience.

For one thing, my vegetarianism was anathema to French cuisine. I only peeked into celebrated stores like Printemps and Gallaries Lafayette, but ultimately shopped at giant flea markets where I was too shy to barter for the Zidane jersey I wanted. I bought French electronic music and spent hours in FNAC, where a whole world of French and Francophone pop buzzed brightly around me. I did break down occasionally and buy English magazines, but was conscious of why I did so: because I was overwhelmed and lonely, because every day of struggling for words - in the classroom, at the post office, in front of my landlord, at lunch - was constant, exhausting work. As an English major and creative writer I discovered how utterly lost and robbed I felt when I words failed me, when my school French was incapable of producing the humor and irony I wanted to communicate. I clung to American friends, seeking solace, but knew that they were like me: they wanted Parisian friends, to abandon their American identities, to escape being caught as a foreigner.

I didn't even have time to travel outside of France. I took six classes, two of which were at the Sorbonne, determined as I was to experience elite French education. I admit that I was horribly embarrassed in those classes: I dressed differently, spoke haltingly, and was for all effects, clearly an outsider. Even the neat Clairefontaine notebooks that every student scribbled in made me feel shabby and out of place. 

And yet...in the past few years, having gotten over the fact that I didn't have a glorious rite of passage in my time abroad, I have become utterly grateful for the fact that it was such a struggle. I see no point to visiting a country in 2 days surrounded by familiar faces and accents. Losing the gift of fluency taught me to value foreigners' broken English, to understand that in English I have humor, depth, layers of meaning, but that I can still crack a basic joke in French. I didn't read Hemingway but I read Beckett in both French and English, and learned that the impact was after all quite different. I discovered that in France they alter common names, so that if you're looking for the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, you'll never find it unless you're also looking for "La Joconde."

All of this sounds terribly self-congratulatory. It isn't meant to be. In Paris I was homesick, lonely and occasionally depressed. But it taught me that after all there are totally different ways of being in the world. That there are - chose bizzare! - high schoolers in France who idolize Woody Allen and Chet Baker, as well as the culture that brought these two figures into being. I learned that discipline, hierarchy and tradition are immensely valued, in spite of my childhood belief that in "the West" there was a constant rebellion against what had come before.

At this point I'll curtail going into more detail. What I will conclude with is a brief note regarding the overtones of Kushner's article: there is a threat of 'McCulture', as she puts it. But we have to be fair. We must recognize that 'McCulture', the dilution of ethnicity, goes both ways: with Americans abroad, clutching Let's Go, and with citizens everywhere -- in Europe and Asia -- who build and patronize more local McDonalds (if this can be taken as a symbol) than ever before. 

McCulture Part I

I found this interesting article in the Wilson Quarterly, entitled "McCulture" by Aviya Kushner. You can check it out here: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=502808

Here's the framework, in her own words: "Americans have developed an admirable fondness for books, food, and music that preprocess other cultures. But for all our enthusiasm, have we lost our taste for the truly foreign?"

Kushner argues that Americans by nature tend not to engage with foreign cultures - with international literature specifically - in a meaningful way. She emphasizes the tiny percentage (~3%) of annual publications that are genuine translations of foreign writing, and notes that fundamentally, Americans prefer to read books about foreign places through the medium of Anglophone writers. Though she never uses the word itself, there's a patent hypocrisy at play: Americans are credited with avidly consuming foreign culture, but the reality is that we are too lazy to confront these cultures in their native form. Instead, we access them through the familiar voices of fellow Americans. We filter down the authentic and the exotic for those ingredients most appealling to our pre-existing tastes.

I found it really interesting to hear that Horace Engdahl, head of the Swedish academy, publicly denounced his American counterparts for not participating "in the big dialogue of literature." Clearly this is a biased statement; the European market of ideas that Engdahl celebrates is something of an oligarchy with French, Spanish, British and German princes. I don't know if every contemporary Bosnian or Greek author feels that his or her contribution will be celebrated beyond national borders. While it's true that American ignorance about celebrated foreign writers is depressingly apparent, Engdahl's words signal the equal demerits of European presumption.

From a publisher's vantage point, I took stock of some of the figures Kushner published: 25% of books published in Spain in 2004 were translations; in Italy the figure was 22%, and in South Korea 29%. Even China is applauded for its 4%. I may well be letting my own ignorance get in the way here, but I'd really like a more thorough breakdown of these stats - they're too glossed over. I'll bet anything that the highest proportions of those percentages are translations of Western languages -- if not specifically of English alone. As one acidic commentor writes, "does the neglected Mongolian genius really get a look-in?" I wouldn't make the mistake of ascribing any one country or nationality as the true and democratic celebrant of world literature.

Nomenclature

Naming is a difficult game, one that brings out my worst instincts for indecision. It took me several weeks, for instance, to name a teddy bear presented on my 10th birthday. With a staggering lack of originality I finally called it "Paddington," which was fundamentally aspirational since I had all along wished the bear came with a raincoat and galoshes.

I envy lyrical names that roll off the tongue. My name has a choppy, staccato feel that I have never thought beautiful. Still, it's incredible to realize the historicity of a name and the mutations it undergoes over time and in different cultures: Joseph, Yosef, Giuseppe. Claudia, Claudine, Claudette. The Russian name Natasha derives from Natalya, and thenceforth back to Natalie: day of birth, the birthday of Christ. And yet it migrated with travelers from Russia to India, so that today I know Natashas in Bombay and Moscow alike.

Are we conscious of names as part of our birthright? Do we really adopt those characteristics with which they are associated? By that token I would have borne multiple children and claimed the earth and sky as my dominion. Aspirational indeed!

All this because today I struggled to find the right moniker for my blog. How do we encapsulate our personalities, beliefs, likes and ideals in a few choice words? A name is a calling card, a piece of genetic makeup, an acronym for the greater wealth of our physical and mental being. It carries the details of our choices and histories: surely Kate was born Katherine, but why then was "Katie" not allowed to be? Was there a Katherine who came before, and if so, what ghost of her breathes on?

Names of those we love or hate linger in our minds as substitutes for the flesh. We scrawl them blindly and blissfully - sometimes with vengeance - on surfaces around us, each letter encoded with meaning. They can be chosen with different motives and assume several layers and meanings. What they rarely are, as I found when creating this blog, is simple.