Arundhati Roy is not a very clear thinker. The fact that she sometimes stumbles onto admirable positions like her activism around the dam debacles of Southeast Asia is probably precisely that, accidental. Ian Buruma destroyed her as a critic and political thinker in a wonderful piece published some time ago in the New Republic. There, he wrote the following lines:

"There is one verbal tic that keeps recurring in Roy's writings that may help us to understand her feelings-for that is what they are, more than coherent thoughts. She refers a great deal to India's 'ancient civilization', usually to show how humiliating it is for an ancient people to defer to a jumped-up, uncivilized place such as the United States. About President Clinton's visit to India, she observes: 'He was courted and fawned over by the genuflecting representatives of this ancient civilization with a fervour that can only be described as indecent'. . . .
The genuine popularity of American pop culture among the urban masses in India makes the elite feel marginal in their own country, which sharpens their sense of pique. . . .
Being more civilized, wiser, older, and more spiritual is the last wall of defense against superior power. . . . Since many American intellectuals, be they novelists or academics, share Roy's contempt for American pop culture and the vulgar patriotism of the American media, some are inclined to applaud her sentiments. This in itself would be of little consequence, were it not that better informed, more intelligent criticism of American policies, foreign and domestic, is needed more than ever."

What Mr. Buruma declines to do in his article is to apply this criticism to Roy's fiction. Having recently picked up The God of Small Things I must, regretfully, apply the same basic line of thought to Roy's aesthetics as well. The same kind of resentment, the same kind of romantic appeal to a mystified authenticity exists in her fiction as pervades everything she says about politics. It's depressing. Let me reproduce the first paragraph of her book.

"May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute Bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun."

"Dissolute Bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air?" Let us be frank, my friends, this is shitty writing. All the meaty adjectives are bunk. It's romanticism for little girls who want the world to be as beautiful as their pony is. This woman should be assigned a small box of adjectives and even fewer adverbs. She needs to be restrained. She is living in a fantasy world created in reaction to a world she doesn't really like. But like all reactionaries she has lost sight of the wonders of what we actually have.


- posted by Editor @ 9:23 PM

 
I intend Idle Chatter generally to be a place for cultural musings. Politics is a passion of mine and you can sample my outrageous ranting in the Chronincles section of this website. But Idle Chatter is where I prosecute my defense of cultural modernity even at its most stupid. It is a place where neo-sincerity and skepticism (the Phyrronian kind) fight the good fight againt both Heideggerians AND Adornians simultaneously. That I am oft exhausted is clearly not surprising.
Sometimes, however, the sheer act of being a human being in the type of world one would like to realize intrudes upon every sphere of life. The current genocide in Sudan lays down an imperative. Anyone who believes even vaguely in the mutual implication and responsibility of human beings for one another on this planet ought to be in a state of outrage. The genocide must be stopped and the current regime in Khartoum must be rendered a sad historical footnote. It is everyone's duty to be pissed off and it is to the great shame of the White House, the EU, and a number of our NGOs that they disgustingly, even with the shadow of Rwanda looming over us, refuse to call genocide genocide and act when action is needed most. The international community that cannot act in the face of such a situation is a joke and no stupid dithering about the debacle in Iraq or anywhere else is cause to pretend that we should do anything but demand swift military action to end the genocide and the regime right now. No excuses. This is the current responsibility of every nation on earth. Failure implicates us all and is a blow to the collective dream of a true international community. Everyone on this planet should be very angry right now and everyone should be doing whatever they can do, including but not limited to inserting this discussion into places where it might not normally be appropriate.
Check the website below for more information.
http://platform.blogs.com/passionofthepresent/2004/07/human_rights_wa.html
- posted by Editor @ 2:13 PM

 
Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is a lovely movie. It is also a very clever movie. It presents the typical critic with a conundrum. For the typical critic is normally inclined to despise a movie so sublimely trashy and toilet-minded. But at the same time, the movie places a couple of East Asians in the roles that would have assuredly been given, even fifteen years ago, to a couple of nice white boys. The typical critic, wincing at the scene in which modern culture is degraded yet one step further by the spectacle of two English girls having at a game of Battleshits in the public restroom, can't help but admire the progressive politics. The mind of our critic goes into a schizophrenic swoon. The psyche splits. This movie is dumb. This movie has a good message and is culturally progressive. Eventually the critic resigns and simply states both things at once.

Stephen Holden of the New York Times exemplifies this attitude perfectly. He writes, "here is a politically savvy universe where the title characters, 22-year-old New Jersey roommates who are Chinese-American and Indian-American, puncture ethnic stereotypes. But the other foot is rutted knee deep in the muck of perpetual puerility according to Hollywood."

Acknowledge the good politics, but keep the lofty mind protected from the puerile muck of popular entertainment.

Except that the best parts of Harold and Kumar tend toward the puerile. Those are the moments when the theater erupts into laughter. Those are the moments when the delight bubbles forth. There was a man sitting behind me stamping his feet in laughter at the scene in which a hot dog stand employee gives Harold and Kumar a hint about the extra ingredient he has added to the special sauce for the day. "I'll give you a hint," he says, "It's semen."

There is something interesting about the fact that Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle replaces the normal white boy heroes with a couple of East Asians. But the critics are selling themselves short by pretending that this point can be fully divorced from the pop culture stupidity of the movie. Harold and Kumar is a barely veiled celebration of the universal claims at the heart of modern popular culture. And it approaches the problem from the other way round. Harold and Kumar are fully East Asian on the one hand, and fully able to participate and assume recognizable roles within Western popular culture on the other. Probably, they are better at it because they take it more seriously. In the end, they defeat the white people. And why shouldn't they?

The scene where Harold and Kumar finally achieve their grail, a massive pile of sliders at the Castle, is the most poignant refutation of Jose Bove's condemnation of global modernity one could produce. Le Monde once published an article about Jose Bove in which they agreed with him that, "It is a cultural imperative to resist the hegemonic pretenses of the hamburger." Is it? And what really are the hegemonic pretenses of the hamburger? Harold and Kumar simply relish their sliders. And one easily believes that they have indeed relished them. And they haven't been degraded for it. Their individual essence hasn't suffered in the face of this hegemony. They are no less human than Mr. Bove among his artesian cheeses and authentic traditions.

Which is to say that there are still a lot of ways to be. Maybe more than there ever were for more than ever were. And that is the thing that the puerile muck of popular culture keeps showing again and again through all its dumbness. What a privilege to be so dumb.
- posted by Editor @ 7:45 PM