The Giver

The Giver
by Lois Lowry, 1993

This book is required reading in the middle school my sons attended and both of them raved about it as one of their favorite books.  When I recently read it for book club, I was surprised that such an intense, bleak book was being read by our tender, suburban 11 and 12 year olds.  Surprised, but pleased.

The Giver raises important questions about what we value in society, and in humanity.  What are the essential qualities of our humanity?  What role does suffering play?  What is love?  Is it worth reducing our humanity in order to have a more orderly society?

In the utopia of The Giver, all families are chosen.  Everyone is adopted.  Each family has a mother, a father, a son and a daughter.  Family members express appreciation for each other but not "love" (which is deemed too vague a term; they may have a point there). At the beginning of each day, dreams are shared and analyzed away at breakfast.  In the evening there is another mealtime sharing of feelings which serves to monitor and normalize each person's psyche.  Apologies and forgiveness are automatically proferred as part of the rigid, yet cozy set of emotional rituals members of this society exhibit.  This is presented in a rather believable, unpathologized manner.  Built-in therapy is an obligatory family tradition.

All potentially negative experiences are sanitized or analyzed away, including sexuality which is controlled with drugs when children reach puberty and begin to experience "stirrings".  If it could cause emotional pain, it is neutralized.  Interestingly, they still have to employ birthmothers to gestate children, and this is considered a low-class job.  Birthmothers get to be indulged for the few years that they are employed as such, but then go on to live as manual laborers, perhaps to discourage girls from wanting to become birthmothers.  In this society you cannot apparently be both a birther and an intellectual, or even a manager. 

Many aspects of this society seem quite cozy, and indeed it has been carefully constructed to ensure its members' optimum utility and emotional safety.  People need not fear making the wrong decision regarding course of study or job or spouse, since this will be chosen for you.  Furthermore, even children are especially chosen for families.  From a certain perspective this could seem reassuring.  Knowing what we are supposed to do is comforting; people like boundaries and traditions. The problem is that, as in any totalitarian regime, the tradition is not optional and the price of noncompliance may be the ultimate price.

When people are consistently unable to comply with society's requirements, they are relegated to be "released".  "Release" is a semi-mythical exile for members of this society who do not fit in, or who have reached the ends of their lives. Children do not know what it means, and it seems that many adults don't know either.  The Giver is a story of one boy, Jonas, who finds out the real meaning of release.

The book is named after the one person the society employs to act as the repository for all the culture's emotional history, including its painful history, of which everyone else is blissfully ignorant. Through a sort of visceral, sense-memory transfer, the Giver shares these experiences with the Receiver, who will become the next Giver, ensuring a redundant source of these memories.  Twelve-year-old Jonas is presented with the honor of becoming the Receiver, while his friends are being apprenticed to become teachers or scientists or day care providers.  The Giver also functions as a sort of uber-Elder, being consulted by the council of Elders on matters of policy for the society.

What my kids found most impressive about this book, aside from the sheer weirdness of its controlled society, was that the members of the society had lost the ability to see color or hear music.  Jonas, as the Receiver, is gradually given the ability to experience color and music, and with this the sublime and painful emotions that come with their nuances.  This society is predicated on the notion that there must be severe limits placed on human experience so that people will not suffer, so that there will be equilibrium in society.  One is reminded of ascetic movements that extol the plain, such as the Amish, and of Buddhism's assertion that desire is suffering.  Many have tried to reduce human suffering by reducing our ability to feel, or even to perceive, never mind our ability to procreate.  Placing restrictions on behavior is the basis of civilized society, but when is it too much?  When does it lead to pathology, to dehumanization?  It's a good thing this book, banned in some school districts, is required reading in our kids' public school. Far from advocating dehumanizing practices, it encourages kids to appreciate the wide range of experiences that make us human, and to weigh their worth.

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

(written in the 1960’s, published in 1980, 11 years after Toole’s suicide)

This book is a broad, rip-roaring farce but it also deals with serious issues of alienation and coping as an outsider.  The author took his own life after years of trying to get published with no luck.  It was his mother who finally got someone to read the work and realize its genius.

Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of A Confederacy of Dunces, is a morbidly obese, over-educated, indignant misfit who hides his insecurities behind his intellectualism. He is a spoiled, peevish agoraphobic slob who, at age 30, lives with his mother in New Orleans and blames everyone else for all of his problems.  He is hostile, gluttonous, scholarly, prudish, delusional, brazen,  libidinous, visionary and completely hilarious.  Ignatius J. Reilly is my homeboy. 

A Confederacy of Dunces was first published in 1980, when I was in high school, but I honestly don’t remember who gave it to me or how I came to read it.  It certainly wasn’t required in school and I didn’t take any English classes in college.  I remember identifying with Ignatius, with his high-falooting put-downs, his crazy indictments of “modern society”,  his harkening back to some golden age of humanity.  My adolescence in New York City was pretty rocky, and the comfort of someone with more outlandish problems than my own was welcome.   

There is much to love about this novel. It's the story of the spoiled and socially retarded Ignatius and his dysfunctional relationship with his mother, his colleagues and his community, the city of New Orleans, which is a palpable character throughout.  Bourbon Street, the Charles River, the bars and stores and streetcars named Desire.  Wrought-iron balconies, jazz tunes and steamy decay prevail.  The people who live there are a cast of characters indeed: the earnest itinerant, the hard-up cop, the sleazeball barkeep, the miserable neurotic business owners,  the useless professor, the cranky old romancer - the list of oddballs is long and they all  make up Toole's confederacy of dunces.

Ignatius’s Bible is early medieval philosopher Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, a work which plays a significant role in the unfolding of Confederacy’s plot.  Fortuna and her Wheel of Fortune are regularly invoked to take the blame for various twists and turns of fate, or just as often, for the consequences of Ignatius’s deliberate decisions.  Ignatius does a lot of blaming, often in very colorful language too.  His particular brand of emotional immaturity is a classic: blame someone or something else for every shortcoming, inconvenience or misfortune encountered, including those for which one is personally responsible.  His Goddess, Fortuna, allows him to do this with impunity.

Boethius's Consolation is a dialogue between himself and Fortuna which argues that hardship must be endured with philosophical detachment.  This is the furthest from how Ignatius reacts to life.  Ignatius's pyloric valve, a character in its own right, reacts violently to any stress in his life, dramatically opening and slamming shut in response. Ignatius too, reacts violently to any diversion from his expected plan of non-stop self-indulgence.

Another appealing aspect of Ignatius is his absurdly positive body image.  This is a morbidly obese man whose digestion has been utterly ruined by near-constant indulgence in junk food and soda.  Nonetheless he refers to his body as "muscular" and "imposing".   This may be in part due to a southern tolerance for fat, as several other characters are favorably impressed with his girth.  He considers himself to be a likely target of sexual predation by both females and males.  While many of the illustrations of Ignatius make him look rather like a bumbling Oliver Hardy, I imagine him more as a portly Oliver Reed, brooding, brilliant, dishevelled and disoriented in everyday reality. 

There are a lot of sexual themes in the book, mostly treated in a grotesque or absurdist context.  Ignatius is a horny but prudish virgin who has run-ins with the gay scene, a pornography ring, and a "sexually liberated" New York gal who shows him her undercarriage.  He has strange fantasies. A lady in my book club thought he had been sexually molested by Professor Talc, due to a comment about "underdeveloped testicles", but that may have just been Ignatius's hallmark, outrageous hyperbole.  

The range of characters in this novel is impressive.  There's  Jones, a young itinerant black dude who is trying to avoid "vagrancy", and who knows he is being exploited by his boss.  There is the working class coterie of Ignatius's Mom, Santa, the mom's commie-focused suitor, and the chronically masqueraded cop Mancuso.  There are the sleazy denizens and proprietors of the "Night of Bliss" bar.  There is a misguided teen, a tow-the-line shopkeeper, a senile secretary, a militant feminist New Yorker, an ineffectual and phony professor, and many more.  An entire essay could be written about any of these characters, they are so rich and and contextually provocative.

My book club read this recently and the only thing everyone agreed on was that the the Levys were believable.  The Levys are a not atypical, quite dysfunctional bourgeois family that owns a failing and obsolescent pants factory where Ignatius "works".  All of us found the members of this family to be very believable, probably because we are familiar with upper-middle-class suburban families and lifestyles.  The husband has inherited a business he hates, from a father he resents.  The wife is a carping, misguided and utterly ineffectual would-be progressive whose furious and far-fetched calls for social justice might be reminiscent of some Marin "actions for peace" such as taking mass photographs of naked women in trees, etc.

Some have written that A Confederacy of Dunces couldn't have been published during Toole's lifetime because it is too politically incorrect.  It contains controversial portrayals of blacks, Jews and gays and this is considered political plutonium in the New York publishing community.  The fact that Toole's own people, working class Irish Catholics (as well as intellectuals and every other character in the book) are shown with all their foolish foibles, should erase any claim of prejudice or bigotry.  If anything, this work is very much along the lines of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, in which humanity is likewise seen in all its ridiculous, frenzied striving. 

Puccini's Triptych ("Il Trittico")

Il Trittico (The Triptych) By Giacomo Puccini, (1918)
(San Francisco Opera, September 2009)

A triptych is a work of art divided into three parts (from the Greek τρίπτυχο, from tri- "three" + ptychē "fold").  In European-derived cultures it is traditionally associated with religious subjects, the centerpiece of which provides the focal point.  Many triptychs were constructed as tabernacles, or a set of paintings with hinged wings which could be closed to hide and protect the images inside.   Puccini's Il Trittico is just this sort of triptych, unfolding its lyrical wings to expose the hidden connection between its three seemingly disparate operas.

Il Trittico comprises three consecutively composed one-act operas: Il Tabarro (The Cape), a violent tale of romantic and social disappointment among the working poor; Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica), the heart-wrenching centerpiece focused on a submissive birthmother who is sent to a convent; and the famous Gianni Schicchi, a social farce set in the medieval Florence of Dante Alighieri. 

Triptych by Bernardo Daddi (active c.1320-1348)

Giacomo Puccini is probably most famous for his exquisite romantic tragedies, La Boheme and Madame Butterfly.  Il Trittico gives us some very different works: violent, un-romantic, farcical in turn. Some have compared Il Trittico to the French theater of horror, Le Grand Guignol, which sometimes alternated its graphic horror programs with comedies. This has been done primarily because the great Italian maestro, Arturo Toscanini, rashly called the first opera, Il Tabarro (The Cloak), "un grand guignol di estremo cattivo gusto" (a horror show in extremely poor taste).  Thanks to this, others have wrongly expanded this analogy to the entire triptych.  This is wrongheaded on several counts.  The only part of The Triptych with any violence is Il Tabarro, which includes one crime of passion, and no gratuitous horror.  It is more in line with the naturalist or verismo movement which sought to expose the very real plight of the less fortunate in society.

Puccini's chosen framework, the triptych, suggests that the work should be viewed from a religious or spiritual perspective.   We know that Puccini composed each piece consecutively, and that he was adamantly opposed to their being performed separately.  The plays of the Grand Guignol, in contrast, were presented for the sole intent of viscerally appalling the audience using shock value even to the point that the success of an evening's fare was registered by how many people in the audience fainted. While Puccini is often accused of gratuitous sentimentalism (which might be compared to the gratuitous sensationalism of Le Grand Guignol), I would argue that the plays in Il Trittico are not at all gratuitous, but rather form a cohesive picture Puccini very deliberately wanted to draw.

The triptych's Cloak (or Cape), Il Tabarro, opens to reveal a slummy Paris embankment at dusk with dock workers, rag pickers and organ grinders all drinking and singing to keep their blues away.  The opera's female lead is Giorgetta, a disaffected young woman who is the wife of a much older barge owner, Michele.  Giorgetta is having an affair with Luigi, a dockworker her age.  The misery of the relatively wealthy Giorgetta and Michele is contrasted with the loving relationship of the destitute rag-picker Frugola and her husband, the dockworker Talpa.   Giorgetta sings a duet with her lover, Luigi, reminiscing about their carefree youth.  Michele sings to Giorgetta and bemoans the loss of their early love, and the death of their baby son.  He remembers holding them all close inside his cloak.  Giorgetta refuses to kiss him and he wonders if he is too old for her, whether she loves another.  They fight a lot. 

My impression was that Giorgetta married Michele, who is twice her age, to improve her social lot.  She was initially happy with her new station and her baby, but once the baby died, so did Giorgetta's enthusiasm for her marriage.  Young and lusty, bored with her old but loving husband, she bides her time from tryst to tryst with her dockworker.  Michele is hard-working, adoring and jealous.  This is a disaster waiting to happen. 

So what place does The Cloak play in this triptych?  It is the presentation of triptych as tabernacle, a narrative cloak that opens up to reveal its icons.  The cloak opens and we have the starting point, humanity at its animalistic core: scrounging survival on the primordial banks of a dirty, watery world.  The elder Michele once used to cloak to protect, to gather in the family.  By the end of the opera he uses it to hide and then disclose his dirty work, that of eliminating his competitor.  The curtain closes on his cloak's revelation: a silverback has defended his territory. 

The centerpiece of the Triptych, Suor Angelica, takes place in an overtly religious setting, a convent, which invokes images of the Madonna, sacrifice, and the pain of a lost son, a symbol of Christ.  Sister  Angelica is a birthmother who has been banished from her upper class family to the convent after surrendering her child to adoption.  When the story opens it has been seven years since she gave birth and she has resigned herself to her convent life, becoming an adept gardener and herbalist.  Her aunt visits her to get her to sign away her inheritance rights, and while there, the aunt shames Angelica for dishonoring the family.  Angelica begs the aunt for news of her son and the aunt tells her that he is dead.  Angelica crumbles, signs the aunt's papers, and proceeds to poison herself.  Realizing that she is committing a sin by committing suicide, Angelica prays to the Virgin Mary to forgive her, to deliver her, and to show her a sign of her forgiveness.  The final scene is Sister Angelica's dying vision of a small boy inviting her to heaven.  Sinner and saint, the lost and the redeemed: these comprise the center panel of the triptych in Suor Angelica. 

 Il Tabarro/Suor Angelica/Gianni Schicchi, by Dru, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas

The final panel in the series is the most famous, Puccini's social comedy Gianni Schicchi.  The scene opens with the extended Donati family hovering over the dead body of wealthy family elder, Buoso.  Rinuccio, one of the sons, wants to marry the lower-class daughter of Gianni Schicchi, and he tries to bribe a relative into allowing this if the dead man's will is favorable to her.  As it turns out, his will leaves everything to a local monastery and all the relatives gnash their teeth in anger, curse the dead man, and refuse to let Rinuccio marry his lower-class beloved.  In their greedy desperation, they finally allow Rinuccio to talk them into allowing Gianni Schicchi to come over and figure out a way to change Buoso's will in their favor.  One of Puccini's most beautiful arias, "O mio babbino caro" is sung by Lauretta as she tries to cajole her father into helping Rinuccio's revolting relatives. Schicchi agrees and sends his daughter away so that she will be innocent of what he is about to do.  What follows is a comedy of errors in which the greedy relatives get their comeuppance and the young lovers prevail.  The triptych closes on an upbeat.  The unrepentant sinners have been punished, the repentant have been redeemed, and the innocent have their lives ahead of them.

Why would Puccini have so wanted these three operas to be performed together?  They do form a cohesive unit, not only as a triptych depicting different types of sinners, their punishments and penances, but also as a narrative of Puccini's attitude towards these things.  The first two operas feature "fallen women", both of whom have lost children, the last two feature ambivalent and controversial attitudes towards the Church.   In the course of the evening we are transported from the primitive to the sublime to the ridiculous. Ending the series with a comedic farce suggests that there is some sin so banal that it only worth ridicule. One could track the seven deadly sins or the ten commandments through Il Trittico to get a better idea of Puccini's vision in Il Trittico.  I've included links to the libretti below in case anyone is interested in doing a more in depth study of this matter.

Is the triptych a commentary on Catholicism's Madonna-whore complex?   The centerpiece, the only piece with an overtly religious theme, shows a birthmother as Madonna, with the promise of her lost Christ child returning at the end to redeem her.  The whore Giorgetta and the virgin Lauretta flank the centerpiece of this triptych, Suor Angelica, a true tragic figure who represents both. 

Libretti

Il Tabarro
Suor Angelica
Gianni Schicchi

Dreaming in Hindi

by Katherine Russell Rich (2009)

Recently my Mom heard the author of Dreaming in Hindi talking on NPR, and since my Mom knows that I like Bollywood movies and have been studying Hindi, she decided to buy me the book. The good news is that there is lots of material of genuine interest to those concerned with language learning and second language (and writing system) acquisition. The bad news is that there is something very bizarre about Ms. Rich's diction which begs the question of whether she is deliberately strangling English grammar to emulate a linguistically disoriented state, or whether she really does not have a very firm grasp of English grammar.

As a person, the author is very likable. She is a middle-aged, divorced, rather bourgeois New Yorker who survived breast cancer and then decided to run off to India and study Hindi for a year. That takes some nerve. She is also something of a naive, curious sweetie, and with very little background information on India or Hindi, she plunges head-first into a Rajasthani adventure. The book alternates between her memoir and her research into language learning. While she is not a very talented writer (and is arguably incompetent as an editor), I was touched by how earnest she was in trying to understand her adopted culture, and the processes by which we gradually assimilate another language.

Palace at Udaipur, Rajasthan

Why she chose the state of Rajasthan as the place to study is unclear, since Hindi is not the standard register there. This complicates her language learning inasmuch as the Hindi she is learning in class is significantly different from the Mewari spoken on the streets and in her host family. We learn that Hindi is considered something of a colonial language in India since most people speak other languages or widely divergent dialects of Hindi. Several Rajasthani variants claim or are struggling for language status.¹

Alienation and the re-creation of one's sense of self play a large part in this book. Katherine arrived in India a few weeks before the events of 9/11/01. As an American, after 9/11 she is sequestered away, then brought out as a symbol of a fellow nation terrorized by radical Islam, and then shunned as the GW Bush administration does not respond aggressively enough against Pakistani-sponsored attacks within India. At this early point the author's language skills are paltry and her disassociation begins. She alternates between seeking solace among her fellow expatriates and delving head-first into various immersive situations such as working as a tutor for poor, deaf children. Working with deaf children doesn't do much for her Hindi, as most of the educated people with whom she makes contact speak English, but it does provide food for thought on the nature of language, multilingualism and second language learning.

Some Indians may be uncomfortable with a number of the cultural and political issues discussed in the book. Much has been written about the Indian dowry system which requires a daughter's family to pay sometimes exorbitant, debilitating sums to a prospective groom for marriage. This has been linked in some cases to female infanticide, dowry murder, and instances of repeat dowry abuse by the groom's family. In a side-note Ms. Rich reveals that it costs twice as much for a family to procure an engineer husband as it does to procure one who is a physician. It wasn't specified, but I wonder whether engineers in India make twice as much as doctors do. In the United States the situation is the reverse, with physicians generally making twice as much as engineers or more.

The terrorism storyline includes India as both victim and as perpetrator, and a controversial parallel is made with America's experience during 9/11 vs. its subsequent military forays into Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the case of India, it too suffered terrorist bombings at the hands of Islamist-sponsored terrorists. On December 13, 2001, while the author was in India, there was a high-profile terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament². India expected at least strong condemnation from the GW Bush administration, which Rich's Indian contacts claimed was not sufficiently forthcoming. Little information is provided on the organizations responsible for this and other, similar attacks inside India, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. A good deal is revealed however, about Hindu fundamentalist organizations inside of India.

This brings us to India as perpetrator of terrorism. Hindu fundamentalist-supported massacres occurred in Gujarat in early 2002 in response to a local train fire in which Hindus were killed. Mention of the train fire was omitted from Rich's book, but is the accepted instigation on both sides, although each claims a different source of the fire. Those who justify the massacres are certain that the train fire was set by local Muslims. Others claim that the fire was an accident which was blamed on the Muslims. Rich gives some in-depth and damning reportage on the Bajrang Dal and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), both groups part of the Hindutva, or Hindu nationalist, movement. She provides an incendiary quote from the founder of the RSS, M.S. Golwalkar, who admired Hitler and who is quoted across the Internet as being an exemplar of Hindu fascism.

While these less than laudable fringe views of Indian society may besmirch the rosy-hued lenses through which many yoga and biryani-loving Americans see India, it's important to remember that India is a secular, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists and Zoroastrians all hold political positions and people of many faiths hold high federal office. In choosing which country in South Asia is most like America, one would have to choose India. Ms. Rich's many exotic experiences tend to drown out any commonalities our nations may have, and the common humanity is all too often blurred by a culturally bewildered, exoticising eye. Nonetheless, we do meet some charming and distinguished characters such as selected local teachers, poets and expatriates.

The on-going acculturation story is intertwined with Rich's post-facto deconstruction of her language-learning experience. Her thesis is that learning a new language creates a new identity. You cannot be the same person speaking a different language. This is a bit overstated, but along the way we are regaled with fascinating forays into neurolinguistics and applied language learning research. Ms. Rich is not someone who easily picks up languages and she wants to find out all she can about those who do, and what might make it easier to do so.

One approach to this is to evaluate motivation. The impact of competition is discussed and it is noted that, like novelty, it can be motivational or demotivational. The Stimulus Appraisal Theory proposed by Austrian scholar Klaus Scherer, outlines five ways in which one appraises an experience, and depending on the responses, one can come up with a good picture of a person's attitude towards anything. Ms. Rich talks with linguist John Schumann about his research into second-language acquisition which builds on the motivational model. Schumann notes that many language learners never get beyond a pidgin-state, while others go on to various levels of fluency. The markers for success in Schumann's view are highly subjective and vary widely from person to person. This doesn't tell us much about natural linguistic aptitude, only strength of motivation.

The standard claims of the existence of a childhood "language-learning window" are made. In my opinion this is a somewhat tenuous marker for long-term second-language ability.  I have known many people exposed to multiple languages as children who did not gain or retain fluency as adults because the language was not consistently used or did not continue to be used. On the other hand I have known many adults who were not exposed to multiple languages as children who subsequently became fluent in foreign languages.  Genuine immersion, motivation and natural ability are much more reliable indicators of language acquisition success. 

What it takes to excel at language learning depends on what type of learning you are doing. Ms. Rich notes that people with lower inhibitions learn to speak more readily since they are not afraid to make mistakes. This doesn't mean that their grammar will be perfect, nor that they will develop advanced listening comprehension skills, but it does mean that they will learn to communicate more quickly. I have seen this in action and can confirm that this is indeed the case. When dealing with reading, writing and listening comprehension, other proclivities come in to play such as aural and visual pattern recognition.

Devanagari: the syllabery used in writing Hindi,
Sanskrit, Marathi and Nepali.

Ms. Rich had some difficulty learning the devanagari alphabet, which is used to write Hindi. Alphabets rely on sequential visual pattern recognition and the ability to quickly associate a visual sequence with a series of sounds and a group of meanings. There is a fascinating description of how different areas of the brain are stimulated when presented with a written word (in which the Russian word for "fleece" is misspelled, but never mind). Ms. Rich quotes a study that suggests there is a "Chinese region" in the brain which recognizes Chinese writing. My guess is that people with photographic memories, people who easily imprint icons, are better at learning Chinese. Since the Chinese have no other writing system, you either have a situation in which the writing system fits the neurologic predisposition of he population, or the population gradually selects for people with superior photographic memories. As with the tendency for the Chinese, who speak a tonal language, to have superior musical pitch, those who can memorize the most characters generally have better photographic memories.

It woule seem that the Chinese associate their characters first with ideas, rather than sounds, whereas users of phonetic writing systems associate the writing first with sound, then meaning. (I recently read that Chinese characters contain radicals also associated with a sound.) Once you can read an alphabetic script, you can sound out virtually any word in the language but not necessarily know its meaning.  In Chinese you learn the picture with its meaning, but the character may sound completely different depending on the dialect or language (Japanese and Korean also use Chinese characters), and will also encounter numerous homophones for a given character (cf. Japanese on and kun pronunciations).  This might suggest a trade-off in memory efficiency and I'm sure some Ph.D. somewhere is studying the effect of so much picture memorization on various areas of cognition and creativity. 

Speaking of creativity, my favorite study in the book is one from the Nijmegen Institute of Cognition and Information in the Netherlands. This study shows that multilingualism spurs greater linguistic association, suggesting that the associative imagination may be especially sensitive among multilinguals.  Apparently when bilinguals sits down to read, every word they encounter stimulates other words they know in other languages. This is like the mind of a poet, whose imagination is constantly stimulated to branch any given word or image into a web of associated words and images.  As someone who has studied many languages, I can vouch for this being partly the case.  The more words we know in any language, the more we naturally  compare sounds and meanings.  The more languages one learns, the easier it becomes to learn more languages as one explores, navigates and imprints phonetic and lexical inventories, grammars, idioms, and patterns of intonation. 

Do we really become other people when speaking another language though?  I don't think so.  Yes, we express ourselves using different nuances and conceptual frameworks when speaking different languages and this can alter our experience of time, space and interconnectedness.  The realization that there are many more ways to show emphasis or respect or desire than our native language offers probably increases linguistic intelligence.  Do we become something other than ourselves when this happens though, or is it simply that the map of ourselves is expanded?  Studies in stroke victims have showed that language information can be very compartmentalized, with victims recalling only one language and not another, or even one category of speech over another.  Yet, as the Dutch study above suggests, the healthy brain is able to reach across these compartments to find a word's mirror-sibling in another language, to launch the ship of associations that allows us to synthesize seemingly disparate,  random sounds and ideas.

Studies on mirror neurons, neurons which fire when we do something and when we watch it done, have shown that these neurons also fire when people read about something being done³.  It has been suggested by V.S. Ramachandran that mirror neurons, and the mimicking behavior they control, were instrumental in the evolution of human language, and possibly in language acquisition today.⁴  If we are wired to mimic that which is around us, and then to assign meaning to our mimicry, we must favor a neurological composition that imprints these patterns and their associated meanings.  What renders one's makeup flexible enough to easily switch one meaning pattern for another?  Is the ability to add vocabulary in one language similar to that of adding vocabulary in others?  If we are repeatedly exposed to new syntactic structures as adults, we can indeed assimilate them, which would suggest that repeated exposure and true immersion really is the key to learning a new language.  The number of repetitions one person versus another needs to remember a given word or syntactic structure varies.  So does the ability to easily recognize audio-visual patterns associated with meaning.  These innate aptitudes, given the same amount of exposure, will determine whether someone more or less easily learns a new language. 

Getting back to Katherine Rich and her adventure in learning Hindi, it is fair to say that her ability to integrate into her surroundings was indeed limited by her inability to penetrate the language, but I would add that it was further hindered by her lack of cultural preparation and her questionable choice of locale for studying Hindi.  Her squeamish revulsion at some of the cultural and political circumstances could have been avoided had she not had to waste so much emotional capital on bring shocked and then paralyzed by her shock.  I still admire that she was brave enough to throw herself into a foreign culture, to attempt to learn the language, and to try and understand the linguistic processes helping or hindering the process.  Had she taken more time to try and understand the anthropology and political history before embarking, she would have come away more successful on all counts. 

Hindi Language-Learning Links

Writing System (Devanagari):
* Hindi Script Tutor

Language:
* UniLang Hindi Lessons Online
* Hindi Bolo Blog

Soviet-era Limericks

Here are some translations I did of Russian chastushki from the Soviet era. The chastushka is a form of Russian folk verse, often sung to the strains of a guitar, balalaika or accordion.

Red cow of the collective farm, we all admire
How you give us milk and lots of fertilizer.
Instead of being fed, you were sent to school for Marxists,
Labor leaders are still awaiting cream because of this.
The whole collective farm is very, very proud of you,
Oh horned one, you're our very own main attraction true.
For in response to Lenin's own appeal throughout the land,
You heaped a load of fertilizer on the socialist plan.

What sort of Bolshevik is this
Climbing on the armored car?
He wears a little buttoned cap,
He can’t pronounce the letter r.
His arm is lifted to the sky,
Can you guess who this is? Try!
A car is standing on the hill,But with no tires it won't go far,All the tires were dragged away,
To make condoms for our collective farm.

Illustrations by Herb Allred
More of my Частушки translations

Deep in Siberian Mines (Pushkin)

Deep in Siberian mines
by Aleksandr Pushkin, 1827
translated by Alfia Wallace

Deep in Siberian mines
hold your proud endurance high,
Your woe-filled work will not be lost
nor the striving of your mind.

Misfortune's stalwart sister,
Hope, lurks in dungeons' gloom,
she'll waken and you'll jump for joy,
so know the wished-for day will come:
Love and friendship will o'errun you
through the sombre, shackled gates,
As my free voice now comes to you
through these craggy grates.

Your leaden chains fall to the floor,
your prison will collapse -
as freedom greets you at the door -
your brothers hand you a sword.


Во глубине сибирских руд...

Во глубине сибирских руд
Храните гордое терпенье,
Не пропадет ваш скорбный труд
И дум высокое стремленье.
Несчастью верная сестра,
Надежда в мрачном подземелье
Разбудит бодрость и веселье,
Придет желанная пора:
Любовь и дружество до вас
Дойдут сквозь мрачные затворы,
Как в ваши каторжные норы
Доходит мой свободный глас.
Оковы тяжкие падут,
Темницы рухнут - и свобода
Вас примет радостно у входа,
И братья меч вам отдадут.
1827

Images: Abandoned Siberian mine from the 1930's; Old Siberian house

Love and Sex with Robots

Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships by David Levy (Nov. 2007)

"Let's face it . The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it ”the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.


Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity."

from The Consciousness Conundrum by John Horgan, on the IEEE website, June 2008

The New York Times recently published an article on its cover entitled "Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man" (7/25/09). It suggests that we may be on the cusp of a post-human era in which computerized superintelligences reign on Earth. The moment this starts to take place is called "The Singularity", meaning the latest in several technological singularities which have changed the way humans live and process information. Technologists and futurists called Singulatarians are worried about how the public will deal with the ramifications of this event. After all, we have already been giving up our jobs and human interactions to robots and artificial intelligence (AI) systems plenty over the past several decades. Are we ready for robot bosses and lovers?

David Levy's book "Love and Sex with Robots" includes an edutaining history of AI, robotics and sex toys and presents this alongside a sometimes disturbing psychological study of our emotional attachment to inanimate objects such as dolls, cars and yes, robots. This is all fascinating, but Levy makes the annoying mistake of insisting throughout that it is simply a hop, skip and a jump from loving a doll and using a vibrator to falling in love with and marrying a robot. I'm not talking a cyborg here, either - Levy insists that the AI will be so convincing and customizable, the sexual prowess so indefatigable, that the lure of the robot lover will be much more compelling than that of any human lover.

Research on human interactions with computerized systems shows that people like to interact with AI that behaves in an empathetic manner, and that we tend to respond as we would to a kind person when dealing with a "kind" computer program. Levy claims that a simulation of a human being would be just as good as a real human being inasmuch as it can be programmed to behave in the way we would like. He uses examples of people who use sex dolls and vibrators to bolster his argument, as these marriageable robots (and humans?) are ostensibly just dolls with really good programming.

Japanese culture plays a large part in the book. The Japanese are great pioneers in robotics and their animist religion allows them to see robots as beneficent living things, much as a sacred rock or sand sculpture. Levy tries to make a case that, because of this cultural premise, the Japanese are quicker to accept non-human and even inanimate objects as being equally valid to humans. He also tries to say that Western culture has tended to paint robots as sinister a la Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but remembering the likable robots in Star Wars, Lost in Space, and The Jetsons, I don't buy that argument.

The New York Times magazine from July 26, 2009 has an article called Love in 2-D, which is all about lonely Japanese men who carry on relationships with stuffed pillowcases emblazoned with the images of scantily clad young cartoon women. The one man whose photo was included with the article looks like your classic "loser", the likes of which we also have plenty in the West. Perhaps it is Japan's higher public tolerance for what we regard as fetish behavior (panty vending machines, rape comics, etc.) which Levy is confusing with the synergistic compassion and empathy that living creatures feel for one another. Levy would argue that this compassion and empathy can be virtually reproduced, creating the requisite chemical responses in us humans that render their source, their inspiration moot.

Robot minders are now being used in Japan to monitor senior citizens who are left alone. Japan also boasts a highly successful brothel chain specializing in the rental of sex dolls. My husband, who also read the book, made a compelling suggestion when we were driving the other day. He works at a Veterans' hospital where he regularly encounters men with serious post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), men who are so psychologically disabled by this condition that they cannot have normal relationships, so no one takes care of them, and their health further deteriorates. A robot-minder who cared for them, provided talk therapy, made sure they took their medicines, and yes, had sex with them, my husband argues, would greatly improve these alienated and deteriorating veterans' lives. Even if they only talked and had sex with them it would be an improvement.

My husband then asked whether I would prefer spending time with an AI-programmed robot of my late father (may he rest in peace) or a to-be-unnamed person whom I don't like. Seeing as I'd rather spend time alone than with someone I dislike, it wasn't entirely a fair question, but it did make me miss my Dad. The father-robot would be programmed with my father's bank of interests, deductive abilities, ethnic and local background, communicative style and sense of humor. That I'd like to see. Or would I?

Am I being sentimental in embracing the frailty, the foibles of life, of preferring them to pre-programmed perfection? This response is inevitable when being banged over the head by Levy's insistence that there really is no difference between being inspired by an inanimate or an animate object. It's not that I discount the real and potential value of robots, or even that I haven't experienced strong emotional responses to things like paintings and characters in novels. My objection is to Levy's facile reductionism. Yes, we may one day better understand how our brain works - memory, inspiration, creativity, attraction, deduction and a host of other brain activities - but, despite Levy's incessant urgings, we really aren't there yet. As a specialist in computer chess and games he confuses the ability to deduce with the whole of one's humanity.

Getting back to the notion of an imminent "Singularity", some proponents of this perceived inevitability (Singulatarians, who are a variant of the Transhumanist Movement) tout that supreme AI will solve all of humanity's problems, ushering in an era of peace and prosperity for all. This is the view of the Zeitgeist movement, which blames the current global monetary system for all the world's ills. Their online forum actually features posts in which movement activists assure members that drunk driving will not be a problem in the future because vehicles will a) fly, and b) include avoidance sensors, and c) be so well-padded and well-suspended that any collision would be rendered harmless. The movement also claims that since technology will take care of all drudge tasks, humans will be free to engage solely in creative and self-improving endeavors. Opponents warn that robots will steal even more (if not all) human jobs and their supremacy will lead to further natural degradation and humans living under a totalitarian regime, not to mention a further degradation of telephone and internet support services.

So, will a significant number of us be schtupping robots in the next few decades? Will people be marrying robots in 2050, as Levy prognosticates? Who knows? I have to agree with the quote at the beginning of this blog entry though - we have serious problems to tackle. The puerile fixation on how far we can take the blow-up doll is disappointing. The notion that a profit motive driven by the popularity of long-distance robo-sex using the Internet and haptic interfaces will make this happen sooner - is just creepy.

Images, I, Robot movie poster, 20th century Fox; Astroboy by Osamu Tezuka, Dark Horse Comics

Gypsy Wedding (Marina Tsvetaeva)

Gypsy Wedding
by Marina Tsvetaeva
June 25, 1917
translated by Alfia Wallace

Hooves dance -
Filth flies!
Before her face -
a shawl, a shield.
Lose the children
Go on, betrothed!
Hey, take them now,
Disheveled steed!

Dad and Mom
denied our freedom,
now the field full and spread
will be our newly wedded bed!

Drunk without wine and full without bread
The gypsy wedding steams on ahead!

The glass filled up,
The glass drunk down,
Guitar and moon and dirt all drone -
The whole camp sways to right, to left,
A gypsy on a prince's throne!
A prince a gypsy has become!

Hey, mister - careful, how it burns!
That's how the wedding drinks it down.

There, in a heap
of shawls and furs -
bells and murmurs,
swords and lips.
The clanging of spurs,
the answer - a necklace.

Beneath someone's arm,
a whistling of silk.
Someone's howling like a wolf.
Snores from someone, like a bull.
Now the gypsy wedding lulls to sleep.

Цыганская свадьба

Из-под копыт -
Грязь летит!
Перед лицом -
Шаль, как щит.
Без молодых
Гуляйте, сваты!
Эй, выноси,
Конь косматый!
Не дали воли нам
Отец и мать -
Целое поле нам -
Брачная кровать!
Пьян без вина и без хлеба сыт -
Это цыганская свадьба мчит!
Полон стакан.
Пуст стакан.
Гомон гитарный, луна и грязь.
Вправо и влево качнулся стан:
Князем - цыган!
Цыганом - князь!
Эй, господин, берегись - жжет!
Это цыганская свадьба пьет.
Там, на ворохе
Шалей и шуб -
Звон и шорох
Стали и губ.
Звякнули шпоры,
В ответ мониста.
Скрипнул под чьей-то рукою -
Шелк.
Кто-то завыл, как волк,
Кто-то - как бык - храпит.
Это цыганская свадьба спит.

25 июня 1917

Sacred Games, Profane Plans

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (2007)

My first brush with Bollywood was back in my teens listening to the international music hour on WBAI radio in New York City. The hypnotic, exotic crooning of Asha Bhosle filled my room and transported me to an enchanted, incense-filled garden of peaceful delights. This doesn't have much to do with the reality of India, but it was an aesthetic experience which gained a foothold in my life.

A few years later I discovered the Namaste America television show, which features Bollywood music videos, gossip and news from India. At a local Blockbuster video store I found some Bollywood movies, and my enchantment endured.

Bollywood films are famous for being long, ornate, over-wrought, lush, epic musicals. Every film promises action, suspense, romance, music and dancing. Besides the escapist and entertainment value, there is the value of learning about another culture and another language. Sacred Games, in that sense, is not too different from a Bollywood film. It is a 900+ page epic of life in Bombay*, modern Indian politics, religious relations, crime, scandal, romance and Bollywood. Bollywood is somewhat peripheral to the plot but its influence suffuses the action as characters regularly sing Bollywood songs and invoke various film scenes and actors.

Sacred Games is primarily the story of a Sikh police detective and the Bombay gangster he seeks to understand. Chandra sometimes writes beautifully, and at other times - less so. I definitely got a taste of what it felt like to be the police detective and of how Bombay gangs operate. There is plenty to thrill and chill, and a lot to mull over and consider. I won't get too into the plots, since they are pretty byzantine, and ultimately, not well-organized or resolved. Many characters are more drawn-out vignettes than anything else and they do not contribute to the plot line.

What I liked most about this novel was learning about Mumbai, its gangsters and Indian culture, although I have read reviews by Indians that this is a somewhat piss-poor rendering of that, targeted at a western audience. If the latter is true, the overwhelming amount of Hindi (and Marathi?) in it is inappropriate. While I learned to curse in Bombay-ese by page 50, the sheer volume of Hindi in the text heightens the sense of the strange and exotic to the point of being annoying, rather than intriguing, especially by page 450 when you are halfway through the book. Most of the words are not in the glossary either. To put this in perspective, I was trained as a linguist and am studying Hindi, and this was still an impediment to rather than enrichment of the whole experience. When I asked the author about this at a conference, he said that it was meant to increase the sense of immersion and that all the Hindi could be found in a glossary on his website.

This book needed much more serious editing. There are a number of plot contrivances that work up to a point, others (such as the insets), which are interesting on their own, but which should have been edited out or published separately, as they don't contribute to the storyline or even to a greater understanding of the main characters. Nonetheless, if you are interested in India and in Bombay gangs in particular, and you like crime novels, this is a fun ramble through that terrain.

*Bombay is the name of the city in Hindi, Mumbai is the name in the local Marathi language.

Night, Street, Lamp and Pharmacy (Aleksandr Blok)

Night, Street, Lamp, Pharmacy by Alexander Blok
October 10, 1912
Translated from Russian by Alfia Wallace

Night, Street, Lamp and Pharmacy
A light so senseless and so slight
That forty years of legacy
will be the same - no chance of flight.
You'll die - and then you'll start again
It all repeats, an ancient stamp,
Night, icy ripple of canal,
Pharmacy, Street and Lamp.

---

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.
Живи еще хоть четверть века -
Все будет так. Исхода нет.

Умрешь - начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.

Drugstore by Edward Hopper, 1927

Jude the Obscure, frustrated linguist

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

We'd like to think that the pursuit of happiness is available to all in the United States, even to bakery clerks who want to become college professors. If someone from an economically disadvantaged background works hard, is intelligent and so inclined, that person should be able to go to college and pursue graduate studies. In practice, people often end up doing what their parents and friends do, if for no other reason than that is the path of least resistance. If they do choose to resist though, there are scholarships, loans and work-study programs to help them along the way. In love and marriage people also often take the path of least resistance. This is a story of those who resisted social barriers in both education and love.

There were not a lot educational opportunities for the poor in 19th century England, and there still aren't in many places. Jude Fawley is a young intellectual from a disadvantaged socioeconomic background, who dreams of studying Greek and Latin and joining the hallowed halls of theologie and academe. Cheeky orphan that he is, Jude goes to great lengths to acquire grammars, Virgil, Homer, the Greek New Testament, lectures of the Church fathers and commentaries, and spends all his free time studying and memorizing. There is a poignant scene in a working man's bar where he quotes passionately in Latin and is ridiculed and generally regarded as a freakish, pathetic upstart.

Even most modern attempts at education equity usually only try to get people to a high school level at most. In the developing world a middle school education is considered more than sufficient since working class children are expected to help their parents with work as soon as possible. In the United States, education equity mostly focuses on getting sufficient education for those who are challenged physically, intellectually or emotionally.

Gifted education testing in public schools here requires parent advocacy or teacher recommendation. It costs districts money to test and grade the tests. There is no posse of lawyers threatening to sue districts over not meeting the needs of the gifted child, as there are for those with children diagnosed with autism, ADHD and other conditions requiring a modified learning environment. This is understandable, as well-to-do parents of reasonably intelligent children can pay to avail them of all sorts of opportunities, while poorer and uneducated parents don't even think to have their kids tested. In Jude's environment a similar situation prevailed: the well-to-do could afford the preparation and fees for university, the lower classes couldn't, and so didn't encourage such aspirations. Jude is saddened by his realization that there are people at the university who are ensconced there neither by virtue of hard work nor passion, but rather by privilege expected and conferred. Such examples still exist today, even in the hallowed halls of such institutions as Harvard and Yale.

This begs the question of the meritocracy in general, and whether we are moving towards it as a culture. Growing up in a working class neighborhood in New York City I encountered hardworking (and lazy) people of all levels of intelligence. Living now in an affluent California suburb, I encounter similar distributions. There is no question that people born into affluence have more choices and that they often take for granted what they do have, regardless of their work ethic, intelligence, talent, or educational expectation.

Now Jude isn't just a low-class, frustrated nerd - he's also a super nice guy who doesn't like slaughtering pigs or hurting women. This gets him into real trouble as a local yokel gal manages to wrastle him into a loveless marriage of convenience. It gets him into more trouble when his even nerdier cousin seduces him with her "will to be loved".

Why is Jude so obscure? Is he obscure in the sense that no one can understand why someone of his class would have such lofty academic pretensions? Or is it his radical ideas on marriage, which he mostly inherited from his ironically named cousin Sue Bridehead? This novel outraged many when it was written due to what seemed its vociferous advocacy for no-fault divorce and the destigmatization of unwed motherhood. In the post-sexual-revolution era we take these freedoms for granted, even as we see the downside in a proliferation of broken families. There are good reasons to advocate for a normalization of divorce and parenthood options. Back in mid 19th century England, divorce and unwed motherhood were a black mark on a woman. Even today, women can be legitimately killed for pregnancy outside of marriage (see honor killings). Nature needs stability as well as dynamism, and the satisfied forces for the status quo can always be expected to pipe up and protect their interests. Hence, Jude the Obscure being banned and burned in its day.

"Their lives were ruined,he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling."

It's not clear to me that Thomas Hardy was so against marriage though. While his first marriage was a long and stormy one, his second marriage seemed very happy and peaceful. Jude and Sue knew there was a pattern of unhappy marriages in their family and Jude's marriage to Arabella was certainly suboptimal. It is not marriage itself that Hardy decries in the novel, it is the inflexibility of the institution of marriage, and of society's attitude towards those unfortunate enough not to have a good outcome in it.

Admittedly, there were a number of situations in Jude the Obscure which annoyed or disturbed me. The character of Sue Bridehead is especially maddening, an archetype of the neurotic, overly-intellectual woman. Her erudition and free-thinking nature are admirable, but sadly ruined by her frigidity, stubborness, and yes, downright perversity when it comes to dealing with authority figures. She is oppositional, passive-aggressive, hysterical, lachrymose in the extreme and a relentless flirt who doesn't put out. Not a great combo, but her intellect, youth and good looks keep men in her clutches. Arabella, the first wife, is earthy, conniving and ribald, but simpler and somehow less maddening than Sue, although certainly less suited to be Jude's wife.

Jude himself is a gem of a character: earnest, sentient, struggling, sweetly ethereal in his academic pursuits and general morals, sullenly earthy in his undeniable masculine desires. I'm guessing that Hardy chose the fate he did for Jude out of a desire to show the result of society's lack of support for such people. It's confounding though because Jude and Sue certainly made plenty of stupid mistakes themselves - it's very hard to see them purely as victims. Then again, this is what makes the whole story believable. There is no real good guy or bad guy - everyone is perfectly human and responsible for the choices they make in the framework society gives them.

Finally, the language is often very beautiful. Hardy was a poet as well as a novelist, and every once in a while it shines through. Some of the language is in dialect but it's not too hard to figure out.

This was not my favorite Hardy novel, but it was worth reading for the issues it raises, even if I don't agree with everything Hardy's characters say (total truth at all times is certainly not the best recipe for on-going affection). The characters are real and fascinating, the atmophere thick and well-drawn, and there is lots and lots to think and argue about. Regardless of Jude's foibles, we can all agree that he should have been afforded a shot at becoming a university don, or at least a school teacher. Could he have had a shot at true marital happiness? That is less clear.

Rose "Jude the Obscure"