Heat: Currently (11:08 a.m.) it’s 80 degrees, projected to be 100 today, and frequently in the 90s well after sunset. The weather plays a large role in our daily routines: Everything we do is in anticipation of the heat or a gambit to avoid the heat. We spend the afternoons, the hottest part of the day, at our hosts’ house, lounging and reading, sometimes napping, which feels decadent. The heat dampens my appetite, and I find myself eating when I am not hungry, which feels gluttonous. It’s hard to take advantage of the coolest part of the day (8-11 a.m.) as the markets don’t typically get going until 11, but finding something to do early in the day can be a rich reward. Last week we took a morning walk in Lodhi Gardens, a large public park spotted with beautiful mausoleums of the Mughal era. Like many of the old sites of Delhi they are built in red stone with a mixed Persian and Hindu style, and in a state of mid- to advanced decay; the artisans who would once have been trained in the upkeep and restoration of the advanced masonry and detail work required to keep these places up are, like the Mughals, long gone.

Barry Hannah is dead at 68. He wrote many of my favorite stories and was the subject of a few more. Sad news.

Via.

RAP BATTLE!

My girlfriend and I are planning a visit to India next month, so I’ve put myself on a crash course in Indian political and cultural history. A number of people directed me to the writings of William Dalrymple, a Scottish historian who has spent most of his adult life in India. I’m reading The Last Mughal, his account of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, during which Emperor Bahadur Zafar Shah II reluctantly supported an unsuccessful insurgent rebellion against the British; its failure led to Zafar’s exile and solidified the British Empire’s position in India. It’s a fascinating read, not least for its depiction of the decline of India’s last Islamic dynasty, which, at its height, ruled virtually all of subcontinental India, including modern-day Bengal, Pakistan, Kashmir, and part of Afghanistan; by the 1850s, the empire was essentially broke and restricted to the city of Delhi. The Mughals brought Persian culture to India; during the empire, Hinduism and Islam coexisted across India and influenced each other. Zafar, himself a poet and Sufist, was a supporter of the arts and friendly towards Delhi’s Hindus, and is portrayed to be wary of hard-line ‘ulamas in his court. (Later, fundamentalist British missionaries would themselves find the orthodox Muslim clerics to be a useful foil.)

Zauq

Early in the book, Dalrymple writes of a feud between the court poets Mirza Asadullah Khan (“Ghalib”), an aristocratic-descended drinker, gambler, and “rake,” known (and satirized) for writing complex verse, and Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq, the Mughal Poet Laureate. The rivalry flared up during the 1852 wedding of Jawan Bakht, age 11, Zafar’s fifteenth son and heir apparent:

The squabble at the wedding was over a single verse in Ghalib’s sehra (or wedding oration) where he appeared–characteristically–to suggest that no one in the gathering could write a couplet as well as he…. Zafar also encouraged Zauq to reply to Ghalib’s unprovoked sally. The fine sehra that the Poet Laureate came up with ended with a couplet tossing the challenge back to Ghalib:

The person who claims poetic skills,
Recite this to him and say,
“Look–this is how a poet
Weaves a real wedding veil.”

The verse was published in the following morning’s newspaper, and Zauq was subsequently shot in the leg outside the studios of Hot 97. Anyone know of any more good feuds between poets of yore?

I’ve always been attracted to Devo’s approach to art: the theory of de-evolution, the premise of which is that “mankind has actually regressed, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society.” Devo foretold the cheap consumerism and rigid social structures that would flourish during the Reagan years, and their music is a tongue-in-cheek pursuit of a kind of dystopian American ideal, filled with cheap, mass-produced electronic sounds, shallow common-sense philosophy, campy militarism, and wan paeans to individuality. They mastered the art of bad poetry in their lyrics, sticking to strict meters and obvious rhymes; their songs amounted to a teetering Tower of Babel to meaninglessness. They perverted  Kraftwerk’s “man-machine” concept and turned the group into a brand, which fans could buy into by ordering Devo merchandise (most famously the red plastic “flowerpot” hats) from catalogs on the record sleeves. The resulting mix was a clever jumble of lowest-common-denominator commercial music, almost laughably accessible, spliced with high-art social commentary. Read more »

Last Wednesday marked the passing of the diminutive character actor Zelda Rubenstein, best known for playing the medium in (among other things) Poltergeist. From her obituary, I learned that she was an activist for little people’s rights and an early voice for AIDS awareness and prevention (this was back when you didn’t have to live in South Carolina to make a political career shitting on people with HIV or AIDS). But, like many quasi-famous people, she died in the shadows of giants–in her case, J. D. Salinger and Howard Zinn.

For most people in the public eye, death is more or less the last time you get to make an impression on the world. How you’ve lived your life is no longer open for debate. (One of my favorite exceptions to this is Yul Brynner, who appeared in an anti-smoking PSA after his death.) After you die, your obit is your life. It’s pretty unlikely you’re ever going to make the news again.

So what happens when your notable death is overshadowed by the death of someone much more important? Does that minimize the contributions you’ve made? Or better asked, if the appreciation of your contributions is minimized, are your contributions themselves minimized?

Here are some prime examples of decently famous people whose deaths were overshadowed by much more famous people. Note how the less-famous person’s death seems less of a tragedy when compared to that of the more-famous person, and reflect on the enduring tragic unfairness of life, even in death: Read more »

Just heard that J.D. Salinger, novelist, short story writer, and famous recluse beloved of twee independent-aesthete filmmakers and assassins, has died. Farewell, strange genius.

People degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart. [...] We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’s bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology good, but every manifestation of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

Jaron Lanier, excerpt from You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf). Via Harpers (subscription).

Last December, there was a flurry of responses to what could be a milestone in digital publishing: the Virginia Quarterly Review’s decision to post a four-part, 19,000-word account of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks exclusively online. The report itself, by journalist Jason Motlagh, is a testament to the value of detailed, feet-on-the-street long-form journalism, one of the species made endangered by the Great Media Upheaval. Motlagh covers the attacks from dozens of points of view, untangling a series of chaotic events across multiple days and involving hundreds of principals.

The central theme running through the responses mostly runs along the lines of “holy shit, a web site is publishing a huge serious-journalism article.” At Fingerlakes Wanderer, Lorraine Berry writes, “As far as I know, this is the first time that an article of such importance and length has been published as a Web-only feature by a print magazine.” And Carolyn Kellogg of the LA Times notes that this type of reporting is typically reserved for “a handful of larger-circulation magazines such as the New Yorker,” pointing out that “other venues have been retreating from this kind of extensively researched international writing.”

Read more »