blogger mysteries

I finally figured out how to add links to the sidebar. So proud of myself. Then the whole sidebar disappeared. Then it came back. Font size changes of its own accord, and becomes impossible to change back. And now that I'm trying to figure out how to post summaries/hide the long part, and well, things are not working out as simply as I'd foolishly hoped.

movie mole: born into brothels

J & I reviewed Born Into Brothels,winner of this year's Academy Award for best documentary.
The film was directed by British photojournalist Zana Briski and US film editor Ross Kauffman.Born Into Brothelsfollows Briski's project of teaching photography to a group of children who live in Sonagachhi--Calcutta, India's red-light district--as well as Briski's efforts to get these children of sex workers admitted into boarding schools.

The children—the girls Suchitra, Tapasi, Shanti, Puja, and Kochi, and the boys Gour, Manik, and Avijit—take time away from their schoolwork and chores to photograph their world and to critique their own and each other's photos. They also accompany Briski on trips to the ocean and the zoo. Some of the children are quite talented—one of Suchitra's photos is featured on the cover of an Amnesty International calendar, and Avijit is invited by the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam to be part of their Children's Jury in 2002. The children's work has been auctioned at Sotheby's, and is featured in a book documenting the project as well. Proceeds from these ventures are returned to the children though the Kids With Cameras foundation, which Briski set up to support similar projects around the world. A current Kids with Cameras project is developing an arts school for the children of the Sonagachhi area.

Born Into Brothels has been praised for its stunning visuals, for the heartwarming charm of the children, for its presentation of the saving powers or art and creativity, and for the small but uplifting triumphs of Briski's outreach work. Moreover, the filmmakers' interest in returning profits to the Sonagachhi community is a commendable attempt to avoid the dangers of exploitation attendant on such documentary projects.

On the other hand, the film has also been criticized on several counts. Partha Banerjee, who worked as a translator on the film, chiefly during post-production, has noted publicly that some of the film's scenes are staged, and he calls the film's music choices “troubling,” both for the use of glitzy Bollywood tunes, and for the unacknowledged lifting of the final tune from Oscar-winning Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's celebrated Apu Trilogy. Further, Banerjee observes that Born Into Brothels fails to inform viewers that the Sonagachhi district has benefited from years of activism by sex workers themselves as well as by local social workers, medical practitioners, and other activists. For instance, the sex workers and their allies have set up financial institutions, health clinics, sex education schools, and blood banks in the district, and the HIV rate among sex workers in Sonagachhi is only 5% instead of 80% as in other areas like Mumbai.

Journalist Sabyasachi Bandopadhyay, writing in Indian Express, notes that Indian activists including film director Gautam Ghosh, novelist Samaresh Majumder, bureaucrat Nitin Ganguly and University professor Mani Nag have helped set up workshops, schools, clinics, and day-care centers in Sonagachhi. In addition, much work has been done by the Durbar Women's Coordination Committee, an umbrella organization of sex workers in West Bengal, which has 65,000 members.

Journalist Seema Sirohi, writing for OutlookIndia, notes that some members of the Durbar Committee have complained about feeling “used” by Briski's work, and that others have questioned whether the filmmakers obtained legal permissions from the sex workers involved in the film. Briski and Kauffman have said that they will not be screening Born Into Brothels in India, because many of the children's mothers asked for their identities to be protected. Sirohi notes that other activists who helped Briski would like the opportunity to see the film, and that international screenings do not precisely “protect” the identities of those in the film.

emails: the life of the mind

>>>> F----,

>>>> Having now read the 4 dunye articles you sent me cites for, I feel compelled to write and ask what's up with your stranger inside article, since it became clear to me while reading these articles that yours is better than all four put together. (ok, it's true I never liked xxxx xxxxxxx anyway, but he's so patronizing!). Anyway, have you sent that somewhere? If not, send it to Callaloo--the best of these 4 articles was in there--I bet they'd publish yours.

. In other news, not much. If we can find a babysitter we may go see a new documentary on Martin and Lyons on monday, which would be fun. Homophiles unite, I always say!

>>>> xoxo

>>>> K

>>>Hey, K---,

>>>Thanks! I sent it to Cinema Journal. Then I lost the acknowledgment letter. So now I don't know what to do about asking them what's up with it. Maybe the letter told me how long to wait before asking. Maybe it gave me a manuscript number to refer to. But I don't know, and my apt. is so chaotic I can't find the letter (I saw it in the vicinity of the desk a couple months ago....). Any suggestions? (I sent it in August or September.)

>>>xo,

>>>f

>> Hey-

>> I'd just write them and ask. The worst that can happen is that they answer and scold you for not citing your number or something...

>> Hey, since I have you on the line (metaphorically) what exactly does diegesis mean? I'm guessing it's the film term for plot-level but I can't really remember...

>> xo

>> K

>Thanks. Will do.....

>And yes. Narratological more generally, but I guess most common re film.

>xo,

>f

>

>OED:

> diegesis, n.

> Add: b. [a. F. diégèse, introduced in this sense by E. Souriau1953, L'Univers Filmique 7.] spec. The narrative presented by a cinematographic film or literary work; the fictional time, place, characters, and events which constitute the universe of the narrative.

> > Sigh. I must say that your speed and eptitude (is that even a word?)with the good uses of the web come closer than anything else I've encountered to persuading me that I should buck up and learn how to do it...maybe over the summer...For now I'm trying to figure out enough about blinds (who cares?) to buy some that will keep my kid from waking up at, literally, dawn's first light. Horridly bourgeois, I know, but my sanity is dependent on not getting woken by her everyday at 6 am.

xo

K

> The only reason I've gotten so speedy and ept is that I waste a huge amount of time browsing around. (Much easier than actual, you know, work.)

>You could get her one of those sleep masks I find so helpful.

>xo,

>f

>

hmmm sleep mask...worth a try. I was considering giving her gin, myself.

Reminds me of a (what I like to think of as) a recent "Ithaca moment":mp went to see her acupuncturist, 

who's also a dyke mom and pal of ours, and was telling her about AL's recent slide into a mini-version

of hothead paisan (tho only at home, thankfully)--hitting, using "mean words", general non-compliance and 

outright defiance at every turn--and the acupucnturist (I am not making this up) said to give her pickles and

greens, because she's having an upper giao or something deficiency.

xoxo

K

a dangerous thing

Capitol bill aims to control ‘leftist’ profs
The Law Could Let Students Sue For Untolerated Beliefs.
Tallahassee — Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities.
The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, passed 8-to-2 despite strenuous objections from the only two Democrats on the committee.

The article quotes Baxley saying, “Freedom is a dangerous thing, and you might be exposed to things you don’t want to hear."

comas for the poor!

Juan Cole suggests that the “use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan.”

Let's be fair, however; their motives surely aren't religious. Congress and the pResident are very concerned with making sure that that woman in a persistent vegetative state (Florida?) gets fed. But they are less worried about the hunger of the conscious.

So they’ve cut food stamp funding, though nearly 4 million households in the US go hungry.

The solution is obvious: put the poor into comas, and then our legislators will help them get fed through tubes!

Oh, but then who will pay for the tubes? In Texas, thanks to W, the state can terminate life support against a guardian's will, if they can't pay. And Molly Ivins, citing Digby, notes

Those who passed this bill are the same politicians who want to outlaw medical malpractice suits like the one that provided the care for Terry Schiavo for many years while she was in "a persistent vegetative state." They are the same politicians who have just finished changing bankruptcy law so that it is now much harder for families hit by tragedies like this one to get out from under the staggering medical bills. How dare they talk about morality?

march march

Well I went to the peace march on the 2-year anniversary of the last invasion of Iraq.

I didn’t find it as uplifting as some there apparently did.

I mostly felt disappointed it was so small, irritated it hadn’t been better advertised, demoralized that such events seem to have no impact on an administration that just ignores whatever it doesn’t want to deal with.

But not going would have been worse.

Might have been more uplifting in New York or London.

democracy, inc.

W has been taking credit for promoting democracy in the middle east. But Juan Cole points out that it’s a sham, on several counts.

More broadly, Dilip Hiro notes that “The history of the past six decades shows that whenever there has been conflict between furthering democracy in the region and advancing American national interests, U.S. administrations have invariably opted for the latter course.”

(For some reason he omits the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s republic in favor of reinstalling the Shah, when the prime minister planned to nationalize Iran’s oil.)

costs of war

There are the tens of thousands of dead, the wounded, the demoralized, the displaced, and the increasing numbers of insurgents. And then there’s this:

The $151 billion already allocated for the U.S. war in Iraq could have purchased:
*Housing vouchers for 23 million families or
*Health care for 27 million uninsured Americans or
*3 million new elementary school teachers or
*Two years worth of: food for half the hungry people in the world AND a comprehensive global AIDS treatment and prevention program AND clean water and sanitation throughout the developing world AND childhood immunizations for all children in the developing world.
SEE THE REPORT

cold equations

The student report in sf class on Tom Godwin’s story “The Cold Equations” argued that the story was, indeed, simply about the laws of nature. It was a good report, because he laid out a number of possible readings. But he entirely rejected those that didn’t simply take the story on its own terms.

Since for that day we had also read “No Woman Born,” by C.L. Moore, one of the few women publishing regularly in the 40s-50s era sf magazines, a story about a woman whose brain is installed in a metal body, I had made some flippant comment at the beginning of class about it being “gender day.” The student reporting on “TCE” referred back to that comment in the course of his disparaging comments about possible feminist readings.

No doubt I will be lambasted in the student evaluation forms for being “too feministic.” This is (most of) the follow-up email I sent to the class:

Our discussion of “The Cold Equations” brought up a number of important points about the process of literary interpretation. That the story is about the laws of nature as immutable seems fairly clear. The point is explicitly and repeatedly made in the text: we read of “law not of men’s choosing” (293) “physical law” (303, twice), “the laws of nature” (305, twice), “laws that knew neither hatred nor compassion” (306) “a law that . . . was incapable of sympathy” (307) “forces that killed with neither hatred nor malice” (313), and so on. Any reading that did not acknowledge that this is the central thesis of the story would be seriously flawed by missing something that isexplicitly stated, and clearly central to the narrative.

On the other hand, any reading that stopped with this point would be awfully thin (or superficial, depending on which direction you like to take your spatial metaphors). That the stowaway is a girl—-both female and young (and pretty)-- is also repeatedly stressed in the story. Pilot Barton’s discovery that “It was a girl” gets its own paragraph (295). She wears “perfume” (295) and “lipstick” (299), and is skilled in the traditionally feminine arts of cooking, sewing, and “nursing” (297). “Pretty girls” (303) are not jettisoned on earth, but Marilyn is subject to a “law that recognized neither innocence nor youth nor beauty” (307)—so we know by inference that she has all three of those useless qualities. Not only is her gender important, but so too is her youth. She’s compared to a “pup” (295) anddescribed as a “kid” (298) and a “child” (300), and, more pathetically, a “lonely little child” (307) and “small and limp like a little rag doll”(299)—a comparison marked by its association with both youth and femininity (since, stereotypically, it’s girls who play with dolls).

These characteristics are presented as significant to the pilot’s emotional response to the situation, and (since the pilot is the character through whom the narrative is focalized, the central consciousness through whose perceptions the narrative proceeds), therefore central to the emotional or rhetorical effect of the story for the reader. We’re told that “had the stowaway been a man,” it would all have been over in a few minutes (295), and that the pilot will “fear” the “nights” when the girl “would come in his dreams to die again” (307).

From this point the possibilities for interpretation get more interesting, because more complex. One could take the observations about the gender and youth of the stowaway as part of an explanation of how the story works to set up its argument—that is, for instance, by playing on readers’ (conventional) expectations that girls are most deserving of protection.

A further twist might be to engage in what’s sometimes called a“hermeneutics of suspicion,” which critic and theorist Jonathan Culler describes as seeking “to expose the unexamined assumptions on which a text may rely” and valuing a text for the ways “it helps us to rethink issuesof moment today” (Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction,Oxford: Oxford U P, 1997, 68).

One version of this would be the argument that the frontier is representedas masculine territory. We read of “men scattered wide across the frontier” (293); the laws of the space frontier are “hard and relentless”(296). While one might suggest that the “men of the frontier” (306, twice) are “men” in the generic sense of “humans,” there is no evidence that there are women on the frontier (the exploration parties on Woden are evidently all male).

Although presumably there are males on earth and the colonies, who might be as ignorant of frontier life as Marilyn is, that wouldn’t necessarily contradict the reading of the frontier as masculine, since cultural conventions often suggest some men are more masculine than others—one might think of the western genre’s opposition between the gunslinger and the citified dandy, or, for those of you who’ve read Regeneration in World Views, perhaps the hostility felt by Sassoon for the elderly civilian gents he encounters. It may be notable that the only male earth resident specifically mentioned in the story is Marilyn and Gerry’s father, a shopkeeper presumably well past the age of the “men of the frontier.” It might also be relevant that Woden is the Norse god of war.

Another possible move would be that of considering the legal or regulatory context in which the story places the physical laws it highlights. That is, for instance, one might raise the question of why it isn’t standard procedure for the EDS pilot to look in the closet before taking off. The relevant “issue of moment today” in that framework would be the conceptual slippage whereby contingent effects appear to be inevitable, and the ways such slippage can justify a status quo (in the story, perhaps the masculinity and political order of the frontier—since stowaways both ignorant and outlaw will be jettisoned).

Anyway, my point here isn’t that any of these interpretations is the Right One, but that stronger interpretations will take account of more textual details, and provide explanations that go beyond the obvious. Culler suggests that, often, part of the process of interpretation is what he calls “playing the ‘about’ game: ‘so, what is this work really about?’” He notes that

This question is not prompted by the obscurity of a text; it is even more appropriate for simple texts than for wickedly complex ones. In this game the answer must meet certain conditions: it cannot be obvious, for instance, it must be speculative. To say ‘Hamlet is about a prince in Denmark’ is to refuse to play the game. But ‘Hamlet is about the breakdown of the Elizabethan world order,’ or ‘Hamlet is about men’s fear of feminine sexuality,’ or ‘Hamlet is about the unreliability of signs’ count as possible answers. (Literary Theory, 64)

nuclear summers

The American Sociological Association responds to Lawrence Summers.

Excerpt:
Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' recent statement that innate differences between the sexes might explain women's poor representation in science and engineering has generated strong public debate. Summers' "call for more research" . . . suggests that there is no overwhelming body of serious scholarship that informs this topic. Yet there is substantial research that provides clear and compelling evidence that women, like men, flourish in science, just as in other occupational pursuits, when they are given the opportunity and a supportive environment.

read. the. assignment.

Gave back papers in the fairy tales class. One student was upset-- “I don’t understand this”-- because he’d gotten a C for a paper that didn’t comment on any original tale. He said “I was writing my own, that was the assignment.”

No, this was the assignment:

Write a new version of an old tale. For instance, you might retell "Cinderella" from the perspective of one of her stepsisters, or "Hansel and Gretel" in the style of Carter. Your revision should provide insight into the values, themes, or significance of the original.

I read it to him from the syllabus. “Well, it could be a loose interpretation of Hansel and Gretel. . . . I’m really irritated. I put a lot of work into this.”

But it didn’t respond to the assignment.

No doubt he will burn me on the student evaluation form, as not making assignments clear or not grading fairly.

*sigh*

economically irresponsible

The Bush administration is the first in 70 years to oversee a net loss of private sector jobs, according to Paul Craig Roberts, of all people, Assistant Secretary of the Treasure in the Reagan administration.

Now about all that Social Insecurity bull.

In his first State of the Union address (February 27, 2001), W Bush promised to protect “all $2.6 trillion of the Social Security surplus for Social Security, and for Social Security alone" to maintain the Social Security trust fund.

Now he says, "Every dime that goes in from payroll taxes is spent. It's spent on retirees, and if there's excess, it's spent on government programs.” “There is no trust."

No trust is right. The money is disappeared because the government has been spending it on war and other hobbies.

But all we really need to do to fix it is tax the rich.