All the excitement in television this summer centers on Sarang's HBO series, "Render to Caesar" (tagline: "Drugs. Murder. Sects."), which has finally allowed Sarang to operate free of the prudish constraints of network television. The show follows a unit of the Roman police trying to maintain order in Judea, which is seething with revolutionaries, cults, and everyday criminality. Sarang portrays the Roman institutions of governance as dysfunctional and ineffective, but when a high-ranking official's somewhat soft-headed brother-in-law gives away all of his money following an encounter with a shadowy religious zealot, a special unit is formed to investigate. Although the unit is staffed by castoffs and misfits, its intelligent, pragmatic leader and his commitment to "real po-lice work" soon produce results.
Whether those results will be palatable to the existing political and religious power structure is another question, though, and in many ways Sarang's exploration of this issue constitutes the core of the show. In Judea, truth is the first victim of the political machinations of the elites, and the justice system is merely the stage on which political ambitions play out. The only people who can operate with integrity are low-level players such as an arrogant, alcoholic detective from Hibernia, who is the closest thing the show has to a hero.
An interesting aspect of the show is that it portrays several groups in parallel—the police, of course, but also religious groups, politicians, and a network of criminals smuggling contraband through the province. (The second season will apparently focus on dockworkers in the port of Caesaria Maritima.) The viewer comes to realize that in their dysfunction and alienation, these groups are more similar to each other than they first appear. Institutions are all alike, Sarang tells us. They crush individualism, compromise human values, and smother individual efforts to make sense of the world and achieve anything resembling justice. Only by carving out protected spaces in bureaucratic backwaters can individuals accomplish anything meaningful, and when those pockets of effectiveness come to the attention of the incumbent elites, the results are cataclysmic.
I caught up with Sarang at the release party for the pilot episode (which Sarang annoyingly insists be rendered "the Pilate episode" in all written materials). Unfortunately, we didn't get to discuss the show very much, because Sarang spent most of the time lashing out at Dave, whose reaction to the show has been... less than generous. When Sarang started tweeting short clips of the show to generate interest, Dave and his arena rock band, Boltzmann Penis, released the parody song "Blurred Vines," which has become a huge hit and generated intense controversy when it was played at the VMAs. Dave has since made his rounds through the talk shows, criticizing Sarang's decision to film the show in English rather than Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. (Dave invariably describes Sarang's decision as "selling his artistic integrity for 30 pieces of silver." He also likes to joke that Jesus was lucky that Peter disowned him only three times before the cock crowed, whereas Sarang forsakes literature and good taste "basically every time he turns on a camera.") On Charlie Rose, Dave mocked Sarang's decision to focus the second season on a largely white cast of characters, predicting that Sarang's attempt to widen the show's appeal would backfire artistically.
I wouldn't be so hasty. Sarang has found compelling drama in unexpected places before, and most of the cast from the first season will return to reprise their roles. When the Season 2 DVDs arrive (and I expect them any day), I doubt I will be able to resist binge-watching the season over the course of a weekend. The show's verisimilitude and incredibly compelling plot more than make up for whatever deficiencies Dave has found, and I can't wait to plunge into the world of the show again.
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Calista's The Devil and the Deep Sea
Calista's latest effort, The Devil and the Deep Sea, is a subtle and nuanced examination of the way we negotiate the terrain between art and law, and the extent to which personal dimensions govern that space. The story, which is set in the early 1980s, is loosely based on the artwork "Shoot" by Chris Burden, in which Burden was shot in the arm with a .22 rifle. In real life, there were no legal consequences. In Calista's version, the matter comes to the attention of Louis Gelb, a prosecutor in Memphis, Tennessee. Gelb vacillates, but ultimately he brings charges against Robert Fink—not the artist, but a friend of the artist who was roped into the art project and who pulled the trigger. The artist, Jim Sullivan, is also charged, but the charge—disturbing the peace—results only in a 30-day suspended sentence and a $50 fine. Sullivan pays up, and no controversy is generated.
But Gelb brings felony charges against Fink, and this stirs up the hornets' nest that drives the rest of the book. Fink is an earnest college student who simply thought he was helping Jim Sullivan, his idol, produce an avant-garde work of art. Gelb and his wife are ostracized from their social circle in Memphis, and Gelb comes under heavy criticism from the media.
Calista has a sharp eye for the ways that people's responses, varied and fluid at first, harden over time. She also writes insightfully about the way that the reaction of Memphis's elites says as much about their insecurities and ambitions as it does about Gelb and Fink. Gelb brought his family to Memphis after his wife was threatened on a subway in New York, and his arrival in the city was heralded as a sign that Memphis was cosmopolitan enough to compete with bigger, higher-status cities. Now his decision to prosecute Fink is portrayed in the New Yorker and elsewhere as a sign of the city's provincialism and redneck mentality.
Why does Gelb insist on prosecuting Fink? The book gives us several possible answers. The one that puts Gelb in the best light involves a case that came to him as a junior prosecutor in New York. A black teenager, relentlessly bullied because of his obesity, took an unloaded handgun to school as a last-ditch effort to scare his tormentors into leaving him alone. Gelb believed this was a desperate strategy employed by an otherwise sweet-tempered and law-abiding young man, but he was forced to bring weapons charges that ended the boy's high school career and effectively ruined his life. Gelb dwells on the disparity of outcomes... a scared black kid makes a mistake and ruins his life, whereas an entitled white kid knowingly shoots someone and wants to get off scot-free. Fink's lawyer doesn't help matters when he tells Gelb that his client is "a good kid... not one of those," gesturing at the jail cells behind them, filled mostly with black men.
But darker motivations may lurk beneath. Gelb's marriage is in trouble, and it is hard to exaggerate how big a chip he has on his shoulder about his working-class upbringing. His wife's old boyfriends, as well as a friend she reconnects with over the course of the novel, are all upper-middle-class Jews... much like Fink.
It is also pretty clear that while Gelb enjoys his initial success with high society in Memphis, even then he despises the city's small, monochromatic, unsophisticated upper class. After a cocktail party, Gelb won't stop mocking their acquaintances ("Oh, yes, I so enjoyed Wuthering Heights by Jane Austen. Such appreciation for the classics these Southerners have!"). This sparks one of the ugliest fights between Gelb and his wife, and the next day Gelb learns that a hospital has reported a gunshot injury to the police, launching his involvement in the Fink case.
Several chapters follow a New Yorker writer who is dispatched to Memphis to cover the story, and in many ways these chapters are the most illuminating in the book. Sullivan, for instance, gives a several-page monologue on the borderline between art and non-art, his role in exploring that boundary, and Gelb's role in defining it according to the dictates of his conscience. But Sullivan, wracked with guilt over Fink's involvement, ultimately decides to take a much more simplistic line, calling Gelb a bullying cretin and joining the calls for his dismissal. Calista plays this as an understandably human reaction, but also as a betrayal of Sullivan's artistic integrity. In some ways Sullivan's struggle is the moral heart of the book.
I actually had a chance to sit down with Calista to discuss the book at the 92nd Street Y, and the conversation touched on some very interesting points. Here is a partial transcript:
James: Let me start by saying that this book is almost certainly top 10 for the year. I mean, I don't want to sort of pre-shadow—
Calista: You don't want to spoil the much-anticipated—
James: —right, the highly anticipated James top-10 list. That's going to be clickbait in like the middle of December. But anyway this book is just stunning, but counter-intuitively I want to start with maybe my biggest criticism, which is in the nature of a missed opportunity.
Calista: Is this about the jury deliberations? Because you know, it's interesting, I had originally written it—
James: No, forgive me, no, it's just. You've got Memphis high society, you've got the smaller circle of Jewish, I don't want to call them intellectuals, but highly educated Jews who are friends of the Gelbs. And you've got this New Yorker writer, and the larger media culture. And the sentiment is, this guy is a philistine. He's Memphis at its worst, redneck... That's sort of, initially the response is much more varied, but things kind of solidify and everyone gets on the same page. Even Sullivan.
Calista: That's right, I'm really glad that came through, because that was absolutely... you know, the book is set in the 1980s, but in a lot of ways I think you see this dynamic today on Twitter. People don't know what to make of something, and so they—
James: Okay, but here it is. The guy's name is Louis Gelb. Lou Gelb. And I sort of thought to myself, why not name him Phil E. Stein? Get it? Phil E. Stein. It's even a Jewish name.
[long pause]
Calista: Well, let me put it this way. I think that's a joke that only someone at your intellectual level would really appreciate.
James: You know, I guess that's right, the book needs to work on all levels. It needs to work for people who might not have quite my level of... but you know, won't it just go over those people's heads? Won't it be, like, no harm no foul? Like if you get it, great, but if you're maybe a little less intelligent, a little less sensitive to literary allusions...
Calista: Is that a... is that a literary allusion, really?
James: Let's move on.
But Gelb brings felony charges against Fink, and this stirs up the hornets' nest that drives the rest of the book. Fink is an earnest college student who simply thought he was helping Jim Sullivan, his idol, produce an avant-garde work of art. Gelb and his wife are ostracized from their social circle in Memphis, and Gelb comes under heavy criticism from the media.
Calista has a sharp eye for the ways that people's responses, varied and fluid at first, harden over time. She also writes insightfully about the way that the reaction of Memphis's elites says as much about their insecurities and ambitions as it does about Gelb and Fink. Gelb brought his family to Memphis after his wife was threatened on a subway in New York, and his arrival in the city was heralded as a sign that Memphis was cosmopolitan enough to compete with bigger, higher-status cities. Now his decision to prosecute Fink is portrayed in the New Yorker and elsewhere as a sign of the city's provincialism and redneck mentality.
Why does Gelb insist on prosecuting Fink? The book gives us several possible answers. The one that puts Gelb in the best light involves a case that came to him as a junior prosecutor in New York. A black teenager, relentlessly bullied because of his obesity, took an unloaded handgun to school as a last-ditch effort to scare his tormentors into leaving him alone. Gelb believed this was a desperate strategy employed by an otherwise sweet-tempered and law-abiding young man, but he was forced to bring weapons charges that ended the boy's high school career and effectively ruined his life. Gelb dwells on the disparity of outcomes... a scared black kid makes a mistake and ruins his life, whereas an entitled white kid knowingly shoots someone and wants to get off scot-free. Fink's lawyer doesn't help matters when he tells Gelb that his client is "a good kid... not one of those," gesturing at the jail cells behind them, filled mostly with black men.
But darker motivations may lurk beneath. Gelb's marriage is in trouble, and it is hard to exaggerate how big a chip he has on his shoulder about his working-class upbringing. His wife's old boyfriends, as well as a friend she reconnects with over the course of the novel, are all upper-middle-class Jews... much like Fink.
It is also pretty clear that while Gelb enjoys his initial success with high society in Memphis, even then he despises the city's small, monochromatic, unsophisticated upper class. After a cocktail party, Gelb won't stop mocking their acquaintances ("Oh, yes, I so enjoyed Wuthering Heights by Jane Austen. Such appreciation for the classics these Southerners have!"). This sparks one of the ugliest fights between Gelb and his wife, and the next day Gelb learns that a hospital has reported a gunshot injury to the police, launching his involvement in the Fink case.
Several chapters follow a New Yorker writer who is dispatched to Memphis to cover the story, and in many ways these chapters are the most illuminating in the book. Sullivan, for instance, gives a several-page monologue on the borderline between art and non-art, his role in exploring that boundary, and Gelb's role in defining it according to the dictates of his conscience. But Sullivan, wracked with guilt over Fink's involvement, ultimately decides to take a much more simplistic line, calling Gelb a bullying cretin and joining the calls for his dismissal. Calista plays this as an understandably human reaction, but also as a betrayal of Sullivan's artistic integrity. In some ways Sullivan's struggle is the moral heart of the book.
I actually had a chance to sit down with Calista to discuss the book at the 92nd Street Y, and the conversation touched on some very interesting points. Here is a partial transcript:
James: Let me start by saying that this book is almost certainly top 10 for the year. I mean, I don't want to sort of pre-shadow—
Calista: You don't want to spoil the much-anticipated—
James: —right, the highly anticipated James top-10 list. That's going to be clickbait in like the middle of December. But anyway this book is just stunning, but counter-intuitively I want to start with maybe my biggest criticism, which is in the nature of a missed opportunity.
Calista: Is this about the jury deliberations? Because you know, it's interesting, I had originally written it—
James: No, forgive me, no, it's just. You've got Memphis high society, you've got the smaller circle of Jewish, I don't want to call them intellectuals, but highly educated Jews who are friends of the Gelbs. And you've got this New Yorker writer, and the larger media culture. And the sentiment is, this guy is a philistine. He's Memphis at its worst, redneck... That's sort of, initially the response is much more varied, but things kind of solidify and everyone gets on the same page. Even Sullivan.
Calista: That's right, I'm really glad that came through, because that was absolutely... you know, the book is set in the 1980s, but in a lot of ways I think you see this dynamic today on Twitter. People don't know what to make of something, and so they—
James: Okay, but here it is. The guy's name is Louis Gelb. Lou Gelb. And I sort of thought to myself, why not name him Phil E. Stein? Get it? Phil E. Stein. It's even a Jewish name.
[long pause]
Calista: Well, let me put it this way. I think that's a joke that only someone at your intellectual level would really appreciate.
James: You know, I guess that's right, the book needs to work on all levels. It needs to work for people who might not have quite my level of... but you know, won't it just go over those people's heads? Won't it be, like, no harm no foul? Like if you get it, great, but if you're maybe a little less intelligent, a little less sensitive to literary allusions...
Calista: Is that a... is that a literary allusion, really?
James: Let's move on.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Dave's The Carriers
Dave's latest effort, The Carriers, is something of a return to form for the reclusive novelist. After the commercial failure of his nonfiction opus Entertaining Anecdotes from The Lives of U.S. Senators Told from the Perspective of Someone Who Urgently Needs to Urinate, Dave retreated to a rental apartment in Osaka and ignored all communications for 14 months, to the consternation of his readers and the wider literary world. But when Dave emerged last summer, pale and blinking in the bright August sunlight, he held in his hands a typewritten manuscript running to some 2,200 pages. Since then the book has been laboriously translated into English from a private language that Dave invented and then partially forgot, and it has been stripped of the many passages that Dave copied verbatim from Entertaining Anecdotes. The result is The Carriers, one of the greatest novels ever written about illness and the struggle for human connection.
Set in a thinly fictionalized Victorian England, the book chronicles the appearance and rapid spread of a devastating sexually transmitted virus. People who are infected go through a symptomless (but contagious) stage and then develop terrible lesions, debilitating organ failure, sterility, and in many cases premature death. But not everyone is vulnerable: 10-15% of the population is completely immune. The virus can't gain a foothold in their bodies, and they neither experience symptoms nor transmit the disease.
But a much smaller fraction of the population has a different response: their bodies never develop the symptoms of the disease, but they remain contagious for their entire lives, exposing anyone they have sex with. For some time, the existence of these "carriers" is a matter of scientific dispute, and here Dave weaves an enthralling story about scientists and policymakers and their grim efforts to understand the disease and stem its tide.
But the book really gets going about a third of the way through, when the existence of carriers is proved conclusively and the government implements "the Programme"—a policy of isolating carriers from the rest of the population for the remainder of their lives. (It is thought unnecessary and cruel to isolate people who are exhibiting symptoms, since there is no danger of contagion other than through sexual contact. On the other hand, temporary quarantines are set up for people thought to have been exposed to the virus, so that they don't transmit it before the symptoms set in.)
The problem is that carriers are almost impossible to identify unless they turn themselves in. Charles Stonton, the administrator of the Programme, launches a controversial campaign to track the carriers down using forced interrogation and peremptory detainment. Members of Parliament, Government officials, judges, and doctors are split on the effectiveness and legality of Stonton's tactics. Stonton's hand is strengthened considerably, though, when he rounds up seven men who continued having promiscuous sex even though they very likely knew they were carriers. But are the men representative of a larger trend, or are they sensationalized outliers, of the sort bound to crop up in a large country?
Dave's most compelling prose is reserved for the domestic dramas that ensue—women who fear that their husbands are carriers, husbands who without explanation stop having sex with their wives, wives who join their husbands (accused of being carriers) in isolation camps. People are forced to put aside the platitudes and evasions they formerly relied on, because too much is at stake if they are wrong. And people are forced to reexamine the assumptions that, in a more innocent world, seemed built on stone. One woman bemoans the "strange new math that we have been forced to learn" and remembers fondly the days when math seemed "useless and remote, a chilly cathedral" that was compulsory to learn but not to use.
The book's triumph comes from its reconciliation of two seemingly contradictory aims. First, it is unblinking and unromantic about the remorseless logic of the disease and the stringent measures taken to fight it. But bizarrely, a deeply moving romanticism develops regardless, emerging from the struggles, painful failures, and rare triumphs that people find. "Somewhere out there," a husband says, gesturing vaguely toward the New World, "There is a place where none of this has happened, where people can love freely and without consequence. But we have been shattered, and all that is left for us is to make what we can of the pieces. Of life itself." He is speaking of his marriage, but it would be a fitting summary of this masterful novel.
Set in a thinly fictionalized Victorian England, the book chronicles the appearance and rapid spread of a devastating sexually transmitted virus. People who are infected go through a symptomless (but contagious) stage and then develop terrible lesions, debilitating organ failure, sterility, and in many cases premature death. But not everyone is vulnerable: 10-15% of the population is completely immune. The virus can't gain a foothold in their bodies, and they neither experience symptoms nor transmit the disease.
But a much smaller fraction of the population has a different response: their bodies never develop the symptoms of the disease, but they remain contagious for their entire lives, exposing anyone they have sex with. For some time, the existence of these "carriers" is a matter of scientific dispute, and here Dave weaves an enthralling story about scientists and policymakers and their grim efforts to understand the disease and stem its tide.
But the book really gets going about a third of the way through, when the existence of carriers is proved conclusively and the government implements "the Programme"—a policy of isolating carriers from the rest of the population for the remainder of their lives. (It is thought unnecessary and cruel to isolate people who are exhibiting symptoms, since there is no danger of contagion other than through sexual contact. On the other hand, temporary quarantines are set up for people thought to have been exposed to the virus, so that they don't transmit it before the symptoms set in.)
The problem is that carriers are almost impossible to identify unless they turn themselves in. Charles Stonton, the administrator of the Programme, launches a controversial campaign to track the carriers down using forced interrogation and peremptory detainment. Members of Parliament, Government officials, judges, and doctors are split on the effectiveness and legality of Stonton's tactics. Stonton's hand is strengthened considerably, though, when he rounds up seven men who continued having promiscuous sex even though they very likely knew they were carriers. But are the men representative of a larger trend, or are they sensationalized outliers, of the sort bound to crop up in a large country?
Dave's most compelling prose is reserved for the domestic dramas that ensue—women who fear that their husbands are carriers, husbands who without explanation stop having sex with their wives, wives who join their husbands (accused of being carriers) in isolation camps. People are forced to put aside the platitudes and evasions they formerly relied on, because too much is at stake if they are wrong. And people are forced to reexamine the assumptions that, in a more innocent world, seemed built on stone. One woman bemoans the "strange new math that we have been forced to learn" and remembers fondly the days when math seemed "useless and remote, a chilly cathedral" that was compulsory to learn but not to use.
The book's triumph comes from its reconciliation of two seemingly contradictory aims. First, it is unblinking and unromantic about the remorseless logic of the disease and the stringent measures taken to fight it. But bizarrely, a deeply moving romanticism develops regardless, emerging from the struggles, painful failures, and rare triumphs that people find. "Somewhere out there," a husband says, gesturing vaguely toward the New World, "There is a place where none of this has happened, where people can love freely and without consequence. But we have been shattered, and all that is left for us is to make what we can of the pieces. Of life itself." He is speaking of his marriage, but it would be a fitting summary of this masterful novel.
Monday, May 4, 2015
Sarang's Cool It! How We Can Tap the Upper Atmosphere for Safer, Healthier, and More Sustainable Lives
Sarang's latest effort, Cool It! How We Can Tap the Upper Atmosphere for Safer, Healthier, and More Sustainable Lives, is very different from his previous works. Bookstores have not been given clear instructions on where to display the book, and so it has popped up in fiction, nonfiction, politics, science, opinion, and fantasy. Just about the only place it hasn't appeared is the New York Times bestseller list—not because its sales have disappointed, but because the New York Times refuses to "countenance Sarang's ridiculous performance art" by choosing whether to put it on the fiction or nonfiction list.
Cool It! proposes the construction of 4-mile-high towers shaped like the St. Louis Arch (except that each tower would consist of two arches set at right angles to each other and meeting at the top). Pipes would carry water (actually a solution of water and propylene glycol) through the arches, radiating heat away at the top (where temperatures average about 75°F below the temperatures at ground level) and then returning to the surface to be used in air conditioning and refrigeration. Sarang calculates that a few dozen towers could cool an entire city—indoors and out—eliminating the need for air conditioning and allowing people to enjoy outdoor activities all summer long. The towers would also contain lightning rods and would protect vast areas from lightning strikes.
Sarang's reputation precedes him, and critics have approached the book gingerly, fearing that it is some sort of Sokal hoax. Malcolm Gladwell fulminated, "How can I review a book that refuses to put its cards on the table?" (He declined to take the book at face value and called it "a mockery of the brand of journalism I have practiced my whole life, and which I still believe in.") Cass Sunstein greeted Sarang's idea warmly, but noted, "By endorsing the idea, I may be setting myself up for the biggest embarrassment of my life." (Dave tweeted: "Apparently Prof. Sunstein has forgotten about Republic.com 2.0.")
For what it's worth, Sarang insists the plan is real, and has offered to install the system in any city willing to pay a fee that is "commensurate with the services I will be providing and sufficient to cover my expenses while leaving me with a modest profit." So far, no one has taken him up on his offer.
I'll go out on a limb and say that I think the suggestion is worthwhile whether it is serious or not. We are faced with calamity on a grand scale, and it will require every ounce of inventiveness and daring to save our planet and our civilization. The towers must be built—and the sooner the better.
Cool It! proposes the construction of 4-mile-high towers shaped like the St. Louis Arch (except that each tower would consist of two arches set at right angles to each other and meeting at the top). Pipes would carry water (actually a solution of water and propylene glycol) through the arches, radiating heat away at the top (where temperatures average about 75°F below the temperatures at ground level) and then returning to the surface to be used in air conditioning and refrigeration. Sarang calculates that a few dozen towers could cool an entire city—indoors and out—eliminating the need for air conditioning and allowing people to enjoy outdoor activities all summer long. The towers would also contain lightning rods and would protect vast areas from lightning strikes.
Sarang's reputation precedes him, and critics have approached the book gingerly, fearing that it is some sort of Sokal hoax. Malcolm Gladwell fulminated, "How can I review a book that refuses to put its cards on the table?" (He declined to take the book at face value and called it "a mockery of the brand of journalism I have practiced my whole life, and which I still believe in.") Cass Sunstein greeted Sarang's idea warmly, but noted, "By endorsing the idea, I may be setting myself up for the biggest embarrassment of my life." (Dave tweeted: "Apparently Prof. Sunstein has forgotten about Republic.com 2.0.")
For what it's worth, Sarang insists the plan is real, and has offered to install the system in any city willing to pay a fee that is "commensurate with the services I will be providing and sufficient to cover my expenses while leaving me with a modest profit." So far, no one has taken him up on his offer.
I'll go out on a limb and say that I think the suggestion is worthwhile whether it is serious or not. We are faced with calamity on a grand scale, and it will require every ounce of inventiveness and daring to save our planet and our civilization. The towers must be built—and the sooner the better.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
James's The Zealots
James's latest effort, The Zealots, is hard to read. Set in Hamburg in the near-future, it tells the story of slutbangers.com, a pornographic website that mostly features user-submitted videos. The story begins as the proprietors of the website stumble upon a delicious discovery: the daughter of a prominent Muslim cleric in the city has become addicted to hard drugs and has left home. The men lure her into their studio, where they induce her to perform in a degrading hardcore video, which they entitle "Muslim Bitch Begs For It." Although their website generally requires viewers to pay by the minute, they post "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" free for all to watch. Soon it has garnered tens of millions of views, and while it has not directly generated any revenue, it has brought thousands of new paying users to the website. Buoyed by their success, the proprietors of slutbangers.com devote an entire section of the website to hardcore videos featuring Muslim women being humiliated. The young Muslim woman (the cleric's daughter) kills herself with a probably-intentional overdose.
But at this point the story takes a dark turn. Two young Muslim men, enraged by the perceived disrespect being paid to Muslim women, storm into the offices of slutbangers.com and kill the proprietors as well as several staff members.
The world is shocked. "Wir sind slutbangers.com!" is the slogan on everyone's lips and on the front pages of all of the major Western newspapers. Political leaders hail the courage and free-speech advocacy of the slain men. It soon emerges that, just prior to the attack, they and their lawyers had been courageously fending off the Muslim cleric's attempts to use German privacy law to force them to remove "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" from their website. This only cements their status as martyrs for free speech.
But soon a split appears in Western opinion. On one side are people who, however much they may dislike pornography and find it distasteful, are unwavering in their support of slutbangers.com. On the other side are people who deny that you can truly support slutbangers.com unless you embrace their mission of producing and viewing hardcore pornography. After all, how can you defend the right without defending the practice? This latter camp (by far the more numerous one) spawns an ice-bucket-challenge-like phenomenon, in which supporters of slutbangers.com film hardcore sex videos and post them online. At the end of the video, the participants can nominate another couple to "take the slutbangers.com challenge," and if the second couple doesn't post a sex tape within 24 hours, they must make a donation to a charity that primarily or exclusively funds projects in non-Muslim countries. Soon there are few athletes, actors, or elected officials under the age of 70 who have not shown their support of slutbangers.com in the most personal way possible.
The story takes another dark turn, though, as George Clooney not only refuses to take the slutbangers.com challenge, but casts the sole vote against "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" for the foreign-language Oscar. All across the internet, thinkers and pundits condemn Clooney's bizarre hatred of free speech. Clooney gives a brief statement, most of which he spends condemning the violent attack on slutbangers.com, before noting his disapproval of the way its proprietors treated the cleric's daughter and his doubts about the merits of the video compared to that year's other nominees. This pivot is pilloried as the "Liar's But," in the sense that everything he said before the "but," before criticizing "Muslim Bitch Begs For It," was disingenuous filler. "Always wrong to resort to violence," "nothing can ever justify," blah blah blah. Obviously Clooney couldn't wait to get to the part of the speech where he slandered the men behind slutbangers.com.
One freelance pornographer who worked for the site goes so far as to suggest that until you've sexually humiliated a Muslim woman on video, you can't understand what the website was all about and you have no standing to criticize it. The feeling that you get, he argues, just can't be conveyed except through direct experience. Many people feel that this particular argument goes too far, but they endorse the contention that slutbangers.com was misunderstood because many people unaccustomed to pornography took the site's "degradation" porn out of context, construing it as extreme, when really it was well within the mainstream of internet pornography.
The book ends happily with George Clooney drummed out of Hollywood and the surviving staffers of slutbangers.com (including the man who, in the video, sodomized the cleric's daughter and then forced her to fellate him) accepting the Oscar award with a tearful speech, as the entire Western world unites in its support of their noble work.
But at this point the story takes a dark turn. Two young Muslim men, enraged by the perceived disrespect being paid to Muslim women, storm into the offices of slutbangers.com and kill the proprietors as well as several staff members.
The world is shocked. "Wir sind slutbangers.com!" is the slogan on everyone's lips and on the front pages of all of the major Western newspapers. Political leaders hail the courage and free-speech advocacy of the slain men. It soon emerges that, just prior to the attack, they and their lawyers had been courageously fending off the Muslim cleric's attempts to use German privacy law to force them to remove "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" from their website. This only cements their status as martyrs for free speech.
But soon a split appears in Western opinion. On one side are people who, however much they may dislike pornography and find it distasteful, are unwavering in their support of slutbangers.com. On the other side are people who deny that you can truly support slutbangers.com unless you embrace their mission of producing and viewing hardcore pornography. After all, how can you defend the right without defending the practice? This latter camp (by far the more numerous one) spawns an ice-bucket-challenge-like phenomenon, in which supporters of slutbangers.com film hardcore sex videos and post them online. At the end of the video, the participants can nominate another couple to "take the slutbangers.com challenge," and if the second couple doesn't post a sex tape within 24 hours, they must make a donation to a charity that primarily or exclusively funds projects in non-Muslim countries. Soon there are few athletes, actors, or elected officials under the age of 70 who have not shown their support of slutbangers.com in the most personal way possible.
The story takes another dark turn, though, as George Clooney not only refuses to take the slutbangers.com challenge, but casts the sole vote against "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" for the foreign-language Oscar. All across the internet, thinkers and pundits condemn Clooney's bizarre hatred of free speech. Clooney gives a brief statement, most of which he spends condemning the violent attack on slutbangers.com, before noting his disapproval of the way its proprietors treated the cleric's daughter and his doubts about the merits of the video compared to that year's other nominees. This pivot is pilloried as the "Liar's But," in the sense that everything he said before the "but," before criticizing "Muslim Bitch Begs For It," was disingenuous filler. "Always wrong to resort to violence," "nothing can ever justify," blah blah blah. Obviously Clooney couldn't wait to get to the part of the speech where he slandered the men behind slutbangers.com.
One freelance pornographer who worked for the site goes so far as to suggest that until you've sexually humiliated a Muslim woman on video, you can't understand what the website was all about and you have no standing to criticize it. The feeling that you get, he argues, just can't be conveyed except through direct experience. Many people feel that this particular argument goes too far, but they endorse the contention that slutbangers.com was misunderstood because many people unaccustomed to pornography took the site's "degradation" porn out of context, construing it as extreme, when really it was well within the mainstream of internet pornography.
The book ends happily with George Clooney drummed out of Hollywood and the surviving staffers of slutbangers.com (including the man who, in the video, sodomized the cleric's daughter and then forced her to fellate him) accepting the Oscar award with a tearful speech, as the entire Western world unites in its support of their noble work.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Sarang's How the World Is Made
I don't know quite what to make of Sarang's latest effort, How the World Is Made. On one hand, the tract has been met with near-universal dismay in the literary, scientific, and philosophical establishments. Colin McGinn called it "undoubtedly the most inane and perverse book of his benighted oeuvre, somehow managing to be astonishingly illogical and yet deadly boring." Oliver Sacks labeled it "puerile and pedantic." Dave's scathing review was given the headline "An Innovation in Geometry If Nothing Else: Sarang's Reasoning Is Both Elliptical and Circular at the Same Time." (An excerpt from Dave's review was blurbed on the book's cover as follows: "Sarang's book is… a tour de force of… philosophy. Your time would be better spent… reading this [book].")
On the other hand, some observers have praised the book. Hatchjaw found it to be "profound but accessible," while Le Clerque has hailed its universal relevance and penetrating insight. But whereas Dave pilloried the book from the pages of the Paris Review, and Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker, the book's defenders have mostly written on obscure blogs. Among the academic and literary elite, the tide of opinion has run very much in one direction.
As for me, I seem to be one of the few reviewers who is neither delighted nor disgusted by the book. I will be the first to admit that it is not an easy book to read. Its acknowledgement section reads, in its entirety, "After de Selby," but I think the book owes as much to Kant and Kierkegaard as to the mysterious de Selby, whose works I have been unable to find. There is definitely something to Sarang's arguments, but he always seems to push his reasoning into obscure and poorly-supported territory, well past anything his data can support.
An example will clarify what I mean. In the chapter "Of Cities and Men," Sarang "problematizes" the traditional economic and geographical explanations for the rise of cities. Sarang develops startling evidence that the traditional explanations involving density, agglomeration effects, and specialization are ill-founded. For instance, it is commonly thought that the skyscraper revolutionized cities by permitting highly dense business districts to flourish. This theory has become so dominant that it has displaced theories emerging from the Freudian, Marxist, and de Selbian traditions. But is it all based on a lie?
To find out, Sarang looked at data on travel within skyscrapers, an area traditionally ignored by geographers (who focus on commuting patterns across horizontal space). He found that if you add up all movements from floor to floor (using positive numbers for upward movement and negative numbers for downward movement), you find that the vast majority of office workers move, on average, zero floors per workday! So what is the point of building dozens of floors, if the average worker never leaves the lobby?
Dave calls this calculation "methodologically unsound" and "so much hooey," but you can't discount a striking empirical regularity like this with such a perfunctory dismissal. Gone are the days when empirical evidence was excluded from serious discussion of social phenomena—we live in a data-driven society now, and we are better for it. If we are going to understand cities, we have to grapple with Sarang's almost unbelievable findings.
But here is where Sarang pushes his reasoning to places where I am unwilling to follow. It may be true that most floors of a typical skyscraper are "merely so much surplusage," but it doesn't follow that skyscrapers are built merely as an obscene gesture of phallic display. Here I find Sarang's extended exegesis of the word "erection" to be misguided and tedious. Sarang may have proven that skyscrapers are not used for their ostensible purpose, but that's a long way from establishing that they are the fulfillment of corporate executives' "adolescent fantasies of female-anatomy-destroying revenge for the indignity of the birth canal." For one thing, Sarang doesn't address the likelihood that many CEOs were delivered by C-section—but that is just a minor example of the many flaws in his rather tortuous reasoning.
Sarang, like Tolstoy, is better at ridiculing the ideas of others than he is at building an affirmative intellectual framework. To upend major areas of economic and geographical thought is no small thing, but to achieve greatness Sarang's philosophy would have to build a convincing alternative as well. He hasn't done it yet, but let us hope that the chilly reception the world has given How the World Is Made doesn't dissuade Sarang from trying again. The world deserves as much.
On the other hand, some observers have praised the book. Hatchjaw found it to be "profound but accessible," while Le Clerque has hailed its universal relevance and penetrating insight. But whereas Dave pilloried the book from the pages of the Paris Review, and Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker, the book's defenders have mostly written on obscure blogs. Among the academic and literary elite, the tide of opinion has run very much in one direction.
As for me, I seem to be one of the few reviewers who is neither delighted nor disgusted by the book. I will be the first to admit that it is not an easy book to read. Its acknowledgement section reads, in its entirety, "After de Selby," but I think the book owes as much to Kant and Kierkegaard as to the mysterious de Selby, whose works I have been unable to find. There is definitely something to Sarang's arguments, but he always seems to push his reasoning into obscure and poorly-supported territory, well past anything his data can support.
An example will clarify what I mean. In the chapter "Of Cities and Men," Sarang "problematizes" the traditional economic and geographical explanations for the rise of cities. Sarang develops startling evidence that the traditional explanations involving density, agglomeration effects, and specialization are ill-founded. For instance, it is commonly thought that the skyscraper revolutionized cities by permitting highly dense business districts to flourish. This theory has become so dominant that it has displaced theories emerging from the Freudian, Marxist, and de Selbian traditions. But is it all based on a lie?
To find out, Sarang looked at data on travel within skyscrapers, an area traditionally ignored by geographers (who focus on commuting patterns across horizontal space). He found that if you add up all movements from floor to floor (using positive numbers for upward movement and negative numbers for downward movement), you find that the vast majority of office workers move, on average, zero floors per workday! So what is the point of building dozens of floors, if the average worker never leaves the lobby?
Dave calls this calculation "methodologically unsound" and "so much hooey," but you can't discount a striking empirical regularity like this with such a perfunctory dismissal. Gone are the days when empirical evidence was excluded from serious discussion of social phenomena—we live in a data-driven society now, and we are better for it. If we are going to understand cities, we have to grapple with Sarang's almost unbelievable findings.
But here is where Sarang pushes his reasoning to places where I am unwilling to follow. It may be true that most floors of a typical skyscraper are "merely so much surplusage," but it doesn't follow that skyscrapers are built merely as an obscene gesture of phallic display. Here I find Sarang's extended exegesis of the word "erection" to be misguided and tedious. Sarang may have proven that skyscrapers are not used for their ostensible purpose, but that's a long way from establishing that they are the fulfillment of corporate executives' "adolescent fantasies of female-anatomy-destroying revenge for the indignity of the birth canal." For one thing, Sarang doesn't address the likelihood that many CEOs were delivered by C-section—but that is just a minor example of the many flaws in his rather tortuous reasoning.
Sarang, like Tolstoy, is better at ridiculing the ideas of others than he is at building an affirmative intellectual framework. To upend major areas of economic and geographical thought is no small thing, but to achieve greatness Sarang's philosophy would have to build a convincing alternative as well. He hasn't done it yet, but let us hope that the chilly reception the world has given How the World Is Made doesn't dissuade Sarang from trying again. The world deserves as much.
Monday, April 20, 2015
Sarang's Under a Clear Blue Sky
Sarang's latest effort, Under a Clear Blue Sky, offers a piercing, insightful look at the difficulty of advancing in journalism today, particularly for women. The protagonist, Kelly Walters, is a reporter for a conservative website, and she is covering her first big story since being promoted from its ranks of unpaid bloggers. In a sense, this is a great opportunity for her, but the assignment requires her to write with a degree of nuance and emotional intelligence that pushes her to her limits.
The difficulty is that Walters essentially has to tell three stories simultaneously. The first is the story of an entitled, socialistic cadre of pampered fast-food workers, many of them black and/or overweight, but all of them elitist, whose selfish protest for a $15 minimum wage blocked heroic, mostly-white, all-male emergency workers from reaching the scene of an accident at a construction site. The second is the story of lazy, entitled, unionized public employees (the rescue workers) who, instead of finding an alternative path to the accident site, simply sat in traffic while the hardworking, long-suffering victims of the construction accident bled to death. The final story is that of the entitled, incompetent, job-stealing illegal immigrants (the workers at the construction site) who are now, along with the relatives of the workers who died, suing the protestors—that is, people who are here legally, exercising their First Amendment rights like the salt-of-the-earth American citizens that they are. The illegals want to hold them responsible... for what, exercising their Constitutional rights? What's next?
Walters tries to keep these storylines from becoming tangled, and mostly she succeeds, but only by carefully separating the strands from each other, telling one story at a time. This tripling of her workload requires Herculean effort, and Walters' personal life suffers. Here Sarang is especially sensitive to the obstacles facing women in the workplace, especially professional women who are upwardly mobile but "not there yet"—that is, women who can't yet afford servants. In a touching scene, Walters is trying to arrange a date by text message, when she looks up and realizes she doesn't have enough quarters to finish drying her load of laundry. She simply stands, frozen between her smartphone and her soggy clothes, and contemplates the flowers on a tree she hadn't even noticed blooming.
Blue Sky doesn't just cement Sarang's status as one of the most thoughtful writers on women's issues. It also marks a turn away from the strident anti-didacticism of his earlier work. We can build a better society, Sarang tells us, if we empower women like Kelly Walters to chase their dreams. Women shouldn't have to choose between a romantic life and a career in conservative journalism. Right now, Walters is just a junior reporter learning to give her readers the information they need. But if she can stick with it, if we can find a way to support women like her through the tough times, then she may bloom into a thought leader and respected political commentator, repaying society's investment a thousand times.
The difficulty is that Walters essentially has to tell three stories simultaneously. The first is the story of an entitled, socialistic cadre of pampered fast-food workers, many of them black and/or overweight, but all of them elitist, whose selfish protest for a $15 minimum wage blocked heroic, mostly-white, all-male emergency workers from reaching the scene of an accident at a construction site. The second is the story of lazy, entitled, unionized public employees (the rescue workers) who, instead of finding an alternative path to the accident site, simply sat in traffic while the hardworking, long-suffering victims of the construction accident bled to death. The final story is that of the entitled, incompetent, job-stealing illegal immigrants (the workers at the construction site) who are now, along with the relatives of the workers who died, suing the protestors—that is, people who are here legally, exercising their First Amendment rights like the salt-of-the-earth American citizens that they are. The illegals want to hold them responsible... for what, exercising their Constitutional rights? What's next?
Walters tries to keep these storylines from becoming tangled, and mostly she succeeds, but only by carefully separating the strands from each other, telling one story at a time. This tripling of her workload requires Herculean effort, and Walters' personal life suffers. Here Sarang is especially sensitive to the obstacles facing women in the workplace, especially professional women who are upwardly mobile but "not there yet"—that is, women who can't yet afford servants. In a touching scene, Walters is trying to arrange a date by text message, when she looks up and realizes she doesn't have enough quarters to finish drying her load of laundry. She simply stands, frozen between her smartphone and her soggy clothes, and contemplates the flowers on a tree she hadn't even noticed blooming.
Blue Sky doesn't just cement Sarang's status as one of the most thoughtful writers on women's issues. It also marks a turn away from the strident anti-didacticism of his earlier work. We can build a better society, Sarang tells us, if we empower women like Kelly Walters to chase their dreams. Women shouldn't have to choose between a romantic life and a career in conservative journalism. Right now, Walters is just a junior reporter learning to give her readers the information they need. But if she can stick with it, if we can find a way to support women like her through the tough times, then she may bloom into a thought leader and respected political commentator, repaying society's investment a thousand times.
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