Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech

Tonight at Place des Arts, saw a Japanese play by author/director/choreographer Toshiki Okada, with English and French subtitles. Rare to see plays in foreign languages, but they do it for opera and movies all the time, so why not plays. And the six-hour Dutch Shakespeare last year was so great, and was put on as part of the same festival as this play, the Festival TransAmeriques (neither of them has any connection to the americas, so I'm a bit confused about what the festival is really about, but still very impressed with the acts it's brought over). The play is actually three short interconnected plays, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech, which is a bit disappointing since I thought the title was pretty awesome if it was one title, but maybe it still is one title even though the pieces were written at different times, since they interlock extremely well, and are obviously meant to be performed together. Very movement-based, they are almost dance pieces. The setting is an office break room. In the first act, three temps plan a farewell party for a temp who's just been fired. The first man stands up and, with some very awkward gestures, tells his two co-workers they should all pick a restaurant, since they are in charge of organizing the party, and that although the best would be a suggestion, he has brought in a magazine called Hot Pepper that has restaurant listings (the screen behind him informs us, quoting wikipedia, that Hot Pepper is a free monthly magazine). He repeats himself, the best would be a suggestion but otherwise he has this magazine, and his gestures get bigger and more awkward, and the two women sitting down completely ignore him. The second one gets up, she says, as far as restaurant recommendations go, she thinks that Erika, the one who has been fired, once said she really liked motsu hot pot and though this is old information and might not be current, if no one has any other ideas maybe they should choose a motsu hot pot place (she later divulges that this was a lie, but she has a craving for motsu hot pot since she saw it on tv two nights ago). She is also making some really painfully awkward gestures, swinging her arms around and generally being ignored. The third one gets up and addresses the issue of it being the temps who are organizing this party. She has the most awkward gestures to date, involving pelvic rotation, and she also seems extremely shy, which makes it more embarrassing. She feels it's a task for full-time workers, but that they were given the job because they are temps too. Later, the first man says he thinks that they should organize the dinner so that the full-time people pay more. He keeps actually looking at the other two, which in some ways makes him seem like he's the most pathetic, since they do at times have some response to what he says, but they never look at him. The third woman has a later speech wondering why Erika was fired, since she had really good Excel skills, and wonders when they will be fired. She says, when it's her turn, she wants them to pick Chinese for the restaurant, and suggests they all state their preferences now.

Act two, the air coditioner, has two people, full-time workers. First, a man talks about a political talk show he likes, then a woman talks at length about how damn cold it is in the office. Someone keeps resetting the air conditioner. In response, repeatedly, the man suggests they should call the police, if the AC is such a problem. It's hard to tell if he's making fun of her or not. But he seems pretty into her, so you kind of think not. They also have the awkward motions and weirdly, by now, I'm getting very used to them, they almost seem like normal gestures.  The other thing about the crazy motions is that they feel very much like they are the expression of inner feelings, where the words are so banal. They are not wild or rageful, but angular and uncomfortable, slightly sad, maybe like the movements you would make after sitting in one spot for eight hours. They are also kind of beautiful.

One distracting thing, the English and French translations sometimes really didn't match up. For instance, at some point the French says, "Mais oui" and the English says, "No, maybe not, not really." I had to first spend some time wondering whether the disconnect was intentional, then spend time pondering whether they translated the two separately from Japanese, and if so, should I be reading both languages and amalgamating them into a better composite rendering of the original? Better to have made them more similar with such a bilingual audience (but then that brings me back to the first wondering).

The third piece is back to Erika (incidentally the others all had japanese names; Erika's is the only really prominent name), who comes in and makes her farewell speech. She is dancing through a lot of it, doing an extremely endearing little bop with her knees while she shakes her balled-up fists in a circular motion near her head. She says the last almost two years, this job, have been a great time in her life, she's not sure she'll ever be this happy again. She also says she bought these shoes a long time ago, they're just plain black pumps, really, but she's grown fond of them. They kind of remind her of two penguins. Sometimes, when she is bored, she has them talk to each other. At first they didn't like each other. He would say, hey, why you following me? But then they developed a relationship and then she was pregnant, and Erika couldn't believe it, since the shoe had so recently been a little girl, now she was a mother. Then, the shoe goes into labour while Erika is at her desk, and she's worried that someone will come ask her to send a fax, but no-one does. At this point in the play, her awkward motions incorporate the stillness of just one foot, which cannot be disturbed as the shoe-penguin lays her egg. Does any of this sound like the matter of a great play (or triptych)? After having seen it, I can't go back and judge. It was awesome.

Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008)

There's a special joy in finding a really good book by a new novelist. I mean, not new to me, but new to the world. It's especially joyful when I haven't heard anything about the book, but picked it up more or less at random (actually, it was a gift but the person who chose it, my mum, also hadn't heard anything about it beforehand). It did win the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book, Europe and South Asia category, which is certainly something, but I am increasingly of the opinion that even prizes like the Booker don't predict much, quality wise. So, I wasn't expecting much when I opened it, because I'm getting awfully used to disappointing novels and this one didn't come with a recommendation. And I disliked (and still dislike) the title. A Case of Exploding Mangoes gave me a feeling that maybe the book was playing on some kind of facile exoticism. But it is not facile in any way. It is sensitive and poetic and also tough and violent and grapples with grand political historical narrative. It nestles itself within the events of final days of Pakistan's sixth president, General Zia-ul-Haq, who died in 1988 in a plane crash. Apparently the circumstances of the plane crash were never fully discovered, so the book has a lot of room to play with.

I say it nestles itself, it lives in that narrative, but it is both about the historical events and not about them. The main character is the son of a famous Pakistani general who committed suicide, and who is now a young man in the army himself. He becomes friends with a young man quite different from himself, one not at all used to military customs. Every scene leads you one step further along into the logic of the conclusion, in which the plane comes down, but it's always clear that the protagonist's inner (fictional) life is more important, for these pages, than is the fate of the government.

The literary establishment seems, at best, suspicious about historical novels, I guess because they seem conceptually so close to genre writing, what with their interest in plot and events and capitalizing on names and fascinations already present in the reader's consciousness. I think I like historical fiction about as often as I like non-historical fiction. I really enjoyed reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009; winner of the Man Booker prize) but that was more fast-paced and plot driven. It showed an amazing amount of imagination, but the imaginative bits were interstitial, inventions about what Thomas Cromwell might have been thinking the day before he arrested Thomas More, or some other historically verifiable event. Here, the connection to plot is less central. The events, though they are capital-H History and recent, to boot, are only a small part of the life of a novel. I'm not advocating for one type or the other, and I loved reading both of them, but they are very different. Wolf Hall is more of a page turner, and A Case of Exploding Mangoes is more emotionally affecting.

Quote of the Day

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

From The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot

I love the lady of situations. I'm memorizing The Waste Land and am delighted at how memorization improves understanding and appreciation. I've never been a big poetry memorizer before, at least not since I was seven and my best friend Naomi convinced me to join in memorizing Shakespeare soliloquies on the verandah of the Far Cottage at Petawawa Lake.

Poem of the day

Love Is Not All
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by need and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.



Troublingly, I've looked at five different versions of this poem online and cannot find a consensus on the correct version (Pinned down by pain or need? well may or may well? also, two "can not"s instead of "cannot"s, which seemed v unlikely). Until I consult a paper copy, this is my best guess.

What is so strong here, for me, is the duality of the acceptance of the terrible realities of torture and want and at the same time the rejection of the human condition as struggle for basic survival. It's not taking some ridiculous position that, of course, we can all follow our passions all the time and those who don't like bread can eat cake. But it is saying there is a way, without judging others, without putting our heads in the sand, to say that we hope to adhere to a way of living that does prioritize the non-material, the truly beautiful aspects of humanity.

Quote of the Day

I felt fear, tininess and hunger. I decided the only way to become as big as the Big People was to begin eating.

In the infinite coffee shop, my eyes struggled to take in the polyptych menu and its thousand offerings. Eggs with legs, friendly forks and spoons marched across it. GOOD MORNING! Barnyard Suggestions . . . What! I thought. Wanna meet this chicken in the hayloft in half an hour, fella? But these were not that kind of barnyard suggestion. Here in Big People Land, land-o-lotsa wholesomeness, they were suggesting I eat the following: (1) 3 strips of bacon, 2 pancakes, 2 eggs (any style), 2 sausages, juice, toast and coffee; (2) 6 strips of bacon, 5 pancakes, 4 eggs (any style), 3 sausages, juice, toast and coffee; or (3) 12 strips of bacon, 9 pancakes, 7 eggs (any style), 1 1/2 gallons of juice, 3 lbs of toast and a 'Bottomless Pit' (which I took to be a typographical error for 'Pot') of coffee. Thus emptying any barnyard I could imagine of all life. Again I was lost. I felt I was visiting Karnak. I pleaded for half an order of toast, eight pieces.

Todd McEwen, "They Tell Me You Are Big" in The Best of Granta Travel (1991).
I'm not always a fan of this kind of verbal equivalent of slapstick, but this is hilarious.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

The following is a rant about Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005) by by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,  which I found extremely irritating and offensive though it does report a couple of interesting facts (like that the crime rate in the US dropped dramatically about eighteen years after they legalized abortion). But man, it thinks that it's all about defying the conventional wisdom and instead it's just full of that.

And often just stupid:

The economist Isaac Ehrlich, in an oft-cited 1975 paper, put forth an estimate that is generally considered optimistic: executing 1 criminal translates into 7 fewer homicides that the criminal might have committed. Now do the math. In 1991, there were 14 executions in the United States; in 2001, there were 66. According to Ehrlich's calculations, those 52 additional executions would have accounted for 364 fewer homicides in 2001 -- not a small drop, to be sure, but less than 4 percent of the actual decrease in homicides that year. (my bolding)

While I'm opposed to capital punishment and don't want to dispute this conclusion, the reasoning seems absurd: this guy said this, other people think he was being optimistic, therefore the truth couldn't be greater than what he said it was. Because his estimate is considered optimistic, they use it as the top limit of what could possibly be. I mean, give me at least some reason why it's considered optimistic. The "generally considered" argument is exactly the kind of reasoning this book purports to be against.

Also, comment from my brother, who is a statistician (added to this post on April 27):

52 executions in 1991 don't result in 364 fewer homicides in 2001.  They didn't say that the reduction was 7 per criminal PER YEAR, just 7 per criminal (over the course the the criminal's remaining life, maybe?).  I can't believe that each of these criminals commits 7 homicides per year on average.  Without wanting to use a "the actual figure is more like..." argument, I'm pretty sure the actual number for a single year is much much lower. To know by how much the actual number would have been reduced in 2001, you need to know something about the age distribution of the criminals that were not executed (were they the oldest, the youngest? would they even still be alive in 2001?), the amount of time remaining on their jail sentences (would they still be in jail in 2001?) and the ages of criminals when the commit homocides (maybe the ones they decided not to execute would have been past their killing 'prime' 10 years later).

So, my brother points out, the statistic isn't so much optimistic as unrealistic.

Another, more offensive, badly supported passage:

Women's rights advocates ... have hyped the incidence of sexual assault, claiming that one in three American women will in her lifetime be a victim of rape or attempted rape. (The actual figure is more like one in eight -- but the advocates know it would take a callous person to publicly dispute those claims.)

Leaving aside the lameness of the self-congratulation there for being so tough as to stand up to women's rights advocates, something no man has ever been brave enough to do before, apparently, umm, the "actual" figure -- how could you possibly know? You maybe could say something like, 'most serious studies have estimated' or 'a better statistical model would lead us to think' or ... but just randomly stating that you are in possession of an actual -- even if approximate -- number of rapes and attempted rapes in a woman's lifetime. Who knows? maybe their statistics are so damn sophisticated that I would be amazed by how precise they can get with these things -- but they're certainly not giving me information to assess that. And nothing in this book gives me confidence in this duo's ability to be objective and rigorous. Maybe the economist guy is rigorous in his economics work, but here -- in this book that's been rightly criticized for not being economics at all, which wouldn't bother me except don't lay claim to expertise as a basis for believing your story if you don't have any expertise in what you're actually writing about -- they're playing fast and loose with the numbers.

I won't go through all of the examples of offensiveness, since there were many. One of them, in which they are apparently not being racist (unlike in other parts of the book, in my opinion), is about job interviews. It's a proven fact that, in the U.S., people with non-whitey names don't get called for interviews as much even if their CVs are as good. They don't argue with that. But, they say, maybe it's not racism but a reasonable analysis on the part of employers that people with these non-whitey names are disproportionately from poor, uneducated parents and children of poor, uneducated parents succeed less in life, and therefore that these candidates are a bad bet. They're saying, it would be wrong to discriminate against candidates because they're black, but it's okay to discriminate against them because they are also from less privileged backgrounds. That's just good statistics on the part of the employers, not hiring poor people, since poor people are dumber, statistically. There's so much wrong with the auxiliary assumptions that go into this statement (like, maybe the reason these people do less well is BECAUSE no-one employs them rather than it being the case that an employer wouldn't hire them because they're likely to be dumb and lazy), but it also totally ignores the fact that the CVs used in the studies are just as good as those of the whitey counterparts who do get called back, strongly indicating that at least these candidates with forsaken names have not fallen into their statistical pit of failure.

There is so much more to complain about but I will stop here -- okay, one last thing: it bothers me so much when they seem to think that they've come up with an amazing question, like, "What do maximum-security prisoners have to do with Dutch tulip farmers?" (that's not one of their questions, but they're all like that). They have one of these questions at the beginning of each chapter, and in one chapter they have a section on how to come up with clever questions like these. The trouble is, they didn't come up with those questions. They came up with facts and then formed a question afterwards, based on what they'd looked at. That's not questioning, that's just using rhetoric to introduce your topic.

The basic problem all over with this book is that it makes conclusions based on small bits of information without properly situating those bits of information in a larger social or historical context. Also that it's self satisfied and not as clever, and certainly not as revolutionary, as it thinks it is.

good online writing

I imagine I'm getting into this excellent columnist a bit late, still I wanted to tell you, my three readers, that  I'm really into Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/04/hokum/237410/

Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001)

I have not been doing much book-type reading this month. I did just finish Life of Pi, the Booker-prize-winning book about the boy and the tiger who on a lifeboat in the Pacific. Not my cup of tea, really. I kept thinking there was something missing. The story is reasonably entertaining but not a page turner. The descriptions of life at sea are sometimes interesting, but never fully believable, by which I don't mean that I want to literally believe, but I was never wrapped up in them, never lost the feeling that behind this writing was a guy doing some good old-fashioned library research. For instance, this is a line right at the beginning of the book that bugged me like crazy:

I miss the heat of India, the food, the house lizards on the walls, the musicals on the silver screen, the cows wandering the streets, the crows cawing, even the talk of cricket matches, but I love Canada.

Now, I am quite sure -- or at least very willing to believe, without having any personal knowledge of the fact -- that Mr. Martel has been to India, either to research this book or previously for unrelated reasons. Maybe he lived half his life there, for all I know. What I do know: I have never been to India or its surrounding nations and I could have written that passage. In fact, I think it's quite close to what I would write if I were asked to imagine an Indian person, and tell me what he would miss about India, given your own completely superficial knowledge of the area. Well gee, it's hotter there than here, Indian food is awesome, Hindus worship cows and let them roam the streets, and don't they have that inexplicable love of Bollywood musicals and cricket? Yeah, those are things an Indian guy would like that are not so available here in Canada. There's no detail, absolutely nothing personal. The only thing that comes close is the crows cawing, and that's not much.

Really, though, the central weakness is a lack of internality. Pi is a very reflective, and hyper religious, little boy, but his internal reflections are all incredibly flat. He tells you he prays. He tells you he misses his (presumed dead) mother, father and brother. But these facts don't do anything to him, or to us. They're just there. There's a funny scene before the shipwreck where Pi's Hindu, Christian and Muslim mentors converge on him and his parents. The parents are shocked that he's religious at all. The three wise men fight over who Pi really belongs to. But, on the boat, it doesn't change anything, except that in addition to fishing and catching water, he prays. And sometimes thinks of God's greatness when, for instance, he sees lightning. But it all felt so surface. I imagine others feel differently, since it appears to be a pretty popular book.

Where it's best is in the descriptions of the tiger, Richard Parker, like so:

Richard Parker was tougher than I was in the face of these fish, and far more efficient. He raised himself and went about blocking, swiping and biting all the fish he could. Many were eaten live and whole, struggling wings beating in his mouth. It was a dazzling display of might and speed. Actually, it was not so much the speed that was impressive as the pure animal confidence, the total absorption in the moment. Such a mix of ease and concentration, such a being-in-the-present, would be the envy of the highest yogis.

There are also many plays on words: when he was 'tougher than I was in the face of these fish' he's using the idiomatic expression to echo the moment half a page earlier where Pi was hit in the face by a flying fish, and freaked out rather than eating it (he thought the fish was actually Richard Parker's giant paw smacking him and cried out something to the effect of, 'take me now'). I can often enjoy a play on words, so a few points for that.

Overall, I didn't enjoy reading it. I didn't feel happy while I was reading, I felt I was getting through with it. The ending was a bit stronger than the rest, though. It caused me to briefly reflect on what had come before. That's always a good thing in a book.