alternarrative

I have just returned from a commencement gathering at Harvard, where J.K. Rowling delivered a pretty remarkable address. As someone who has traversed the path from being a fan to critic of her Harry Potter works (and remains ambivalent), I really enjoyed listening to such an eloquent, inspiring and deeply moving speech–not least because of the gay wizard joke, her discussion of Amnesty International, her call for siding with the powerless in the world, and for her references to the responsibility of Americans in holding their government accountable. By talking not only about the importance of imagination but also about poverty and justice, she probably said the right things you could say to a group of people that includes some of the most privileged in society. The full text of the speech is available here.

Just happened to discover through Rezwan that Dr. Mahathir has launched his own blog. A remarkable coincidence, for reasons I can’t explain here. But it has to do with him and my work today. I am, after all, a man of coincidences, like Paul Auster’s protagonists.

Anyways, I then suddenly realized from the date that exactly six years ago from today I entered the blogosphere. Let’s just say that both me and my blog have come a long way since then! And I can bet, most of you folks probably didn’t even know what a weblog was, back then. Err, that makes me feel old, so I’ll stop.

Welcome (back)! Lest this move come as a surprise, let me explain that I had actually been pondering the question of anonymity on the internet for quite a while now, and for many reasons. I was hesitating, however, because this blog had been at its previous URL for five years continuously, even through its many evolutions. But since I was already planning to switch to the New Blogger template and all (which, may I say, is quite an improvement!), I figured I’d get two birds in one go. My apologies if you had to face those obnoxious debt consolidation ads at my previous URL: I did mean to leave a note there, but they grabbed the address in less than 12 hours after I vacated it…I didn’t realize it was that popular!

So, bottomline: ‘I’ am now a new, virtual I! For those of you who do know me by first name (in real life), let’s just keep it between us :-)

The few changes to the blog include fresh and revised links on the sidebar, including links that I had been wanting to add for months now, but had just been too lazy to do it! As always, the categorization is largely arbitrary: people’s blogs are just as impossible to essentialize as people themselves!

Enjoy!

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah (belated) and Eid Mubarak (in advance) to all you folks! I am on a week-long vacation in Austin, TX where the copious winter sunshine is really quite enviable for those of us from the North East!

I came across the text of Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Lecture online a few hours after it was delivered in Stockholm, just about two weeks ago. If I’d known earlier, I probably would’ve been able to catch it live, as I did the Nobel Lecture in Peace. Day before yesterday, when passing by the magazine racks in the COOP at Harvard, I spotted the cover of this week’s New Yorker, and on it I noticed they included Pamuk’s speech! Of course, that made me realize that I never remembered to blog about it as I had planned to. Entitled “My Father’s Suitcase”, it’s a remarkably enthralling speech in which Pamuk reflects on his father’s flirtation with writing, on his own personal development as a novelist, and on the nature of literature in general. I haven’t yet read any of Pamuk’s writings, even though I had been wanting to, ever since a Turkish friend of mine told me about My Name is Red one night over dinner table at Commons. That was, I think, sometime early in the Fall last year, months before all the political commotion surrounding Pamuk’s allusions to the Armenian Genocide in some of his work. But if I can guess anything about Pamuk’s literary style from reading his Nobel Lecture, I am certainly looking forward to reading his novels, sometime soon.

I feel compelled to quote one passage in particular, because I think I relate to it deeply:

As for my place in the world – in life, as in literature, my basic feeling was that I was ‘not in the centre’. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world literature, and we Turks were outside it. My father’s library was evidence of this. At one end, there were Istanbul’s books – our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail – and at the other end were the books from this other, Western, world, to which our own bore no resemblance, to which our lack of resemblance gave us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the other world’s otherness, the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee to the West – just as I would do later. Or it seemed to me that books in those days were things we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found so lacking.

Needless to say, my own postcolonial conscience could hardly ever escape a similar sense of provinciality. After all, I grew up reading Shakespeare more than I read Tagore. But Pamuk tells us about his encounter with a different perspective, that came with maturity:

What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me the centre of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but because, for the last 33 years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings would seem to begin to talk amongst themselves, and begin to interact in ways I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books, but for themselves. This world that I had created like a man digging a well with a needle would then seem truer than all else.

While we celebrate Orhan Pamuk’s novels as literary reincarnations of the enchanting city of Istanbul, I think it may be interesting to compare Pamuk to his Egyptian counterpart, the late Naguib Mahfouz — the man who brought Cairo to the world. But of course, Mahfouz never left home: not even to attend the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony! In any case, I strongly encourage you all to read Pamuk’s entire speech.

We’ve all heard, to some degree or other, of Princeton’s infamous eating clubs. I was just skimming through Importing Oxbridge before returning it to the library, when I chanced upon the following passage, which offers a glimpse into the emergence and evolution of the eating clubs:

Tension between the social life of students and the academic expectations of faculty was something of a Princeton tradition. In the early nineteenth century, student life had centered around the Whig and Cliosophic literary societies. In the 1840’s, after enrollments expanded, ten Greek-letter fraternities established chapters clandestinely. These were small organizations, rarely exceeding ten members, but they were feared by the faculty becuase, unlike the literary societies, they existed beyond the pale of parietal supervision. In 1855, in response to the growth of fraternities, the faculty and trustees mandated that all matriculating students promise not to join any secret organization. The fraternities were finally eradicated in 1875. Since the 1860’s undergraduate social life had been dominated by Princeton’s twelve eating clubs, which owned and operated their own houses and provided meals and social life for their members.

The dominance of the eating clubs — nonsecret but still exclusive — increased along with the growing popularity of college athletics, particularly football. The important of social life at Princeton was further abetted by a shift in the composition of the student body: in the late 1880s the number of students preparing for the ministry dropped while the number of students from wealthy backgrounds rose. In the 1890s the clubs constructed elaborate homes that included dining rooms, billiard rooms, sleeping quarters for alumni, and libraries. To Edwin Slosson, the opulence of the eating club rendered the objection to Greek-letter societies nonsensical. He observed that the clubs were just as “luxurious, engrossing and exclusive as the fraternities.” John Corbin praised them as the university’s most valuable social asset.

The typical Princetonian of the early twentieth century was, in Slosson’s assesment, a little like Peter Pan, “not quite grown up, and not quite wanting to be…. The Princetonian does not seem to care whether school keeps or not; but this is not a cynical affectation of indifference, it is the natural indifference of irresponsible and careless boyishness.” Horseplay was apparently more common at Princeton than at other universities. The effort to gain eating club membership could be as strenuous as penetrating Harvard’s socially elite student organizations. Rather than take their chances as individuals, underclassmen organized themselves into associations called hat lines and then applied for membership to the eating clubs as groups. Princeton-bound seniors at preparatory schools that regularly sent students to the university were the leaders of some of hat lines. [Alex Duke, Importing Oxbridge: English Residential Colleges and American Universities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 80-81]

For a more detailed history, you’ll have to see here or here. Or, this amusing article in the Yale Herald.

I came across it randomly at the library, but Importing Oxbridge is a good book to read for those interested in education philosophy and the structure of universities. It prods into the history of American theories of collegiate education and the late-19th/early-20th century movement to emulate the English residential college model, examining in particular the cases of Harvard, U-Chicago, Princeton, Yale, and the Claremont Colleges consortium in California. The book makes some mention of the elitist origins of some of these schools and the exclusionary policies which eventually led to the current system of more-or-less arbitrary admissions, but a more comprehensive book on that subject is Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which I also came across randomly at the library.

Something about this news made me smile: Wal-Mart Decides to Pull Out of Germany.