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  • Lady Audley & Mary Elizabeth Braddon: No need for a fainting couch

    Lady Audley's Secret
    Up until now, whenever I have written about authors (eg. here and here) rather than a particular book of theirs, my impressions of them were gleaned from reading several books. I have only read one book by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a 19th century author who wrote more than eighty (may be more) literary pieces that included novels, poems and plays. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret  (The Wikipedia link describes the plot. Don’t read if you want to read the book later) is unusual enough that it piqued my curiosity about the author’s life and personality. The book is an oddity of sorts – a cold blooded, Victorian era crime novel written by woman.


    Braddon wrote her books around the time that novels by and for women were of a far softer pitch and Wilkie Collins (Woman in White, Moonstone) was making a splash with his own sinister mystery books of intrigue and confused identities. Lady Audley’s Secret, like Collins’ novels, was initially serialized in journals. Later it was published in book form in three volumes and later again serialized in a periodical. The book has never been out of print since it was first published. The striking thing about its plot is that it includes a whole laundry list of criminal activities – attempted murder, faked death, false identity, bigamy, arson, blackmail, child abandonment… you name it. And the villain is an enterprising, calculating woman who resorts to any means necessary to extricate herself from pathetic and penurious circumstances. In an age when woman were afforded far fewer opportunities and rights to determine the course of their lives, the brazen Lady Audley earns the grudging admiration of readers for her single minded (albeit criminal) quest for material comfort and security. Meek she was not, and neither was the author who created her.


    Braddon’s own life was colorful enough to be the backdrop of a sensational novel although her aspirational tools were her creative skills, not a criminal mind. A child of a broken marriage, (her father left her mother and two siblings to fend for themselves when she was four years old) Braddon was educated by her mother who had initially planned a musical career for her. At age seventeen, she became the principal bread winner for the family as an actress with the stage name of “Mary Seyton.” After seven years in provincial theaters, Braddon decided to give up acting for a life of writing and became an instant success. There was no looking back from there for the astute and prolific writer of many sensational stories.  Herself a connoisseur of fine French literature, she had a keen sense of what constituted a popular (and lucrative) best seller on the streets of 19th century England.

    Although she soon established herself as a versatile and prolific writer, Braddon had few illusions about the tastes of her largely working-class readership, which, as she lamented in a December 1862 letter, tended towards “crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning, & general infamy . . . . ” She might have added that her readers enjoyed her attacks on both smug, middle-class morality and upper-class respectability; she revealed the hypocrisy of both governing classes as she attacked their marginalization of women and their social pretensions. She regarded serial writing as a “curse” since it forced her to write more than one novel at once–mere “hand to mouth composition,” as she remarked in a letter to Bulwer-Lytton. Serialization, like her youthful reading and seven years on the provincial stage, however, served her well. In terms of narrative pace and construction, sharply defined characterization, narrative flair, and theatrical scene changes, her knowledge of contemporary comedy and melodrama enabled her to write quickly and with emotional intensity.

    Not only did Braddon expertly plumb the depths of Victorian society’s hypocrisy in her writings, she quietly flouted convention in her own personal life. Although a well known literary figure, she lived with her already married future husband and literary agent, John Maxwell for several years and gave birth to five children out of wedlock. She and Maxwell eventually married when the first Mrs. Maxwell, a resident of a mental institution, died in 1874, four years after Braddon’s last child with Maxwell had been born.  


    I enjoyed reading Lady Audley’s Secret, a very well written pot boiler with no hint of simpering Victorian platitudes. A mystery and suspense story, it is not a whodunnit. There are few surprises on that front. Early on in the book, the author provides pretty good clues about the nature of the shady goings on and the eventual likely outcome. But bristling with one nefarious deed after another and fortuitous coincidences, the melodrama grips the reader’s attention well. The novel unfolds around the suspicions of the gentleman sleuth Robert Audley, Lady Audley’s nephew by marriage, who methodically exposes the treachery and ruthlessness of his aunt (at considerable risk to himself) and all loose ends are tied up neatly at the end.


    Given the bitterness of her own parent’s marriage and separation, that Braddon cast a jaundiced eye on exploitative marriages of convenience, is not a surprise. She observed:

    However nobly a wife may pardon a sin, whatever dignified silence she may preserve, she hardly burns les pièces de conviction, they remain among her papers – the sordid letters which tell the humiliating story of a husband’s infidelity.

    There is no sexual infidelity in Lady Audley’s Secret, but a profusion of deception, both of self as well as  of others. In the end, Braddon portrays the beautiful and villainous leading lady as mentally unhinged. But the reader is left to wonder if she had to do that to satisfy the prevailing sensibilities of her time. Perhaps it was not permissible to create an attractive female character who turns out to be an unmitigated sociopath, utterly devoid of a conscience, as a wholly sane person. In Lady Audley, Braddon flips around the Jane Austen mold of a plain but noble (and therefore attractive) heroine and presents a physically flawless woman who is evil to her core. But was her character convincing?  Reviewer W.F. Rae had this to say in the North British Review:

    Lady Audley is at once the heroine and the monstrosity of the novel. In drawing her, the authoress may have intended to portray a female Mephistopheles; but, if so, she should have known that a woman cannot fill such a part. The nerves with which Lady Audley could meet unmoved the friend of the man of the man she had murdered, are the nerves of a Lady Macbeth who is half unsexed, and not those of the timid, gentle, innocent creature Lady Audley is represented as being … Her manner and her appearance are always in contrast with her conduct. All this is very exciting; but it is also very unnatural.

    Actually Rae was wrong. Braddon did not portray Lady Audley as the unconvincing and contradictory two dimensional figure as he describes. She astutely separated (and let the reader in on it) the character’s charming public demeanor and her disturbing private thoughts. Perhaps Braddon was a woman with a late 20th century mind who knew she was writing for 19th century men like Rae.

  • Fleeing the health care bill

    Rush Limbaugh today threatened to move to Costa Rica if the US health care bill passes.

    Costa Rica offers its citizens universal health care.

  • Emily Howell (Sujatha)

    Meet a composer without arms, legs or human faculties. Emily Howell is the name given to a software program created by David Cope:

    "With Cope’s help, Emily Howell has written three original opuses of
    varying length and style, with another trio in development. Although the
    first recordings won’t be released until February, reactions to live
    performances and rough cuts have been mixed. One listener compared an
    Emily Howell work to Stravinsky; others (most of whom have heard only
    short excerpts online) continue to attack the very idea of computer
    composition, with fierce debates breaking out in Internet forums around
    the world.

    At one Santa Cruz concert, the program notes neglected
    to mention that Emily Howell wasn’t a human being, and a chemistry
    professor and music aficionado in the audience described the performance
    of a Howell composition as one of the most moving experiences of his
    musical life. Six months later, when the same professor attended a
    lecture of Cope’s on Emily Howell and heard the same concert played from
    a recording, Cope remembers him saying, “You know, that’s pretty music,
    but I could tell absolutely, immediately that it was computer-composed.
    There’s no heart or soul or depth to the piece.”

    Listen to the excerpts at the link above. Does it sound machine-made to you, or does your perception that it is created by a machine detract from its musical value?


  • Defects and Prizes (Sujatha)

    Car Now the outcry over the Toyota car recalls has gotten to the point where the venerable Edmunds.com is offering a one-million dollar prize to anyone who can "re-create unintended acceleration in a car and then solve that
    problem and prove the whole thing" to Toyota. What a comedown for a company that has been known as the flagship of quality in cars for so many decades!

    'Reproducible' is the key word here and gets to one of the salient and undiscussed points in all the alarming reports we read in the press. After a long series of horrific articles about the last moments of drivers in runaway vehicles, this Washington post article finally attempts to encapsulate the problems Toyota faces in engineering terms vs. the legalistic view taken by lawmakers on the Hill proceeding with their inquisition of the company's officials.

    "It was made painfully clear at the hearings that a number of
    lawmakers do not understand the process. An exchange between Rep. Eleanor
    Holmes Norton     (D-D.C.) and Toyota president Akio
    Toyoda     illustrated the problem.

    Toyoda said that when his company gets a complaint about a mechanical
    problem, engineers try to duplicate the problem in their labs as a way
    of trying to find out what went wrong. Norton said: “Your answer — we’ll
    wait to see if this is duplicated — is very troublesome.”

    'Reproducible' defects in products are gold for the engineers tasked with failure investigation and analysis. Generally, it is only if the defect leads to repeatable failures that a fix can be found and applied with some degree of confidence that the failure will not recur. Anything else is searching for needles in haystacks. Sometimes it can take a very long time to hit upon the exact combination of conditions that cause a particular failure mode, even with large teams of engineers working to figure it out.

    For those of you who don't own and drive late-model Toyotas, you aren't out of the woods. While Toyota has hogged the major share of unintended acceleration related complaints and crashes, the same complaint has shown up even in other cars. A common feature seems to be not the sticky pedals or floor mats initially blamed by Toyota, but the use of Electronic Throttle Control Systems. 

    Who knows when this issue will be finally put to rest? Nobody, at least not Toyota, which presumably still has teams feverishly working on reproducing the problem, so they can figure out what to fix.

  • God Should Get A Blog

    God's Blog

    Thanks to Narayan for sending me the Bob Mankoff cartoon.
      

  • Mylène Dressler : Casting a net with words

    A performance artist of considerable elegance, Mylène Dressler is a versatile woman.  Whether she is speaking about her latest book, leading a discussion on a classic film or talking about the art and craft of writing, Mylène (pronounced Mi-lan) brings her experience as a dancer, teacher, author and speaker to the forum. I have met Mylène on three different occasions and every time I was struck by her vivacity, dancer's grace and eloquence that she unleashes with abandon to connect with the audience and the subject at hand. I have also read two of her novels.

    The first time I met Mylène it was at a book club meeting to discuss one of her books. Last week a friend and I attended a talk at the University of St. Thomas in Houston to hear her speak to an assorted group of students, teachers and guests about writing. Mylène spoke with conviction, gusto and her usual charm. Among other things, she explained the power, the magic and the essentiality of language as the connector of the human mind to the world. The discussion also touched upon the role of reading and writing in a world of instant communications. Above all, Mylène spoke of her own love of writing that defined the trajectory of her professional life from a dancer to a published author, with a detour in between as a student and teacher of literature.

    Mylene

    A short excerpt from the talk, "For the Love of Writing" which was addressed mainly to aspiring students of creative writing:   

    "Preparing for this lecture this week, I found myself typing a rather unexpected sentence:

    "'Writing, my friends, is a forgiving process.'

    "I looked up from the screen. I tried to conjure your incredulous faces. I tried to guess at your thoughts.  (Is the woman mad?  Does she know anything about writing? Does she know how hard, how often I struggle?)

    "Yet I marvel at it. At how forgiving writing is. Look at how you can take a pass at a sentence. And then another and another and another.  Each time trying to bring it closer to what it is you are quietly, or urgently, trying to say.  Writing allows you to do that.

    "Writing is forgiving.  Writing is forgiving. Time is not. Deadlines are not. Deadlines are stone. The trouble is, at various points in our lives, we're invited to confuse the two.

    "But writing is not stone. Writing is range. Writing is luxury. It is not miserly. It is never stingy. We may experience miserliness in relation to writing–deadlines–what we call writer's block–sometimes it's the impulse simply to grunt toward the bare minimum, and see if we can get away with it–but as a medium, written text is never miserly. It is ever, ever generous. It forgives you. It forgives you even that.

    "Never doubt that writing is there for you. That it places at your disposal an incredibly successful, finely tuned, intensely tested technology, one we've all been sailing with for over three thousand years now. The rudder may fight you at times. But it is in your hands. It was made, in fact, for your hands.

    "Try to remember this."

    For more information on  Mylène Dressler, her books and her writings please visit her website and her blog.

  • Earthquakes in lieu of armed intervention?

    I have read this article twice over. I still can not figure out completely what the war monger is saying (may be he wrote it while more sozzled than usual). Is it a warning to countries in danger or is he wishing annhilation on them via Mother Nature's fury instead of the conventional method of warfare?

  • Sadness as a Muse (Sujatha)

    EyeDoes happiness chase away the creative ability?

    This
    intriguing New York Times article     suggests that depression and its
    attendant emotions might play an evolutionary role that has led to its
    being preserved in the human species across time, perhaps for the
    creative advantages that it confers.
    Imagine, no Lascaux cave art, if it weren't for a miserable young hunter
    who missed his great prey on the plains. Instead, he decided to draw
    his quarry on the walls, trying to recapture the  figure and spirit of
    the animal that had eluded him in reality.

    I exaggerate of course, but there's no proof to the contrary, either. As
    to the article's premise that heightened pain can result in a
    heightened attention to detail, I can attest to that from just merely
    the experience of physical pain (as in a migraine), tiny things jump out
    with greater clarity, cutting through the pain and embedding themselves
    in the brain- the angle of the sun,  the smell of cooking oil twenty
    yards away, the imperceptible sway of a branch, the suddenly deafening
    rendition of the same phrase for the nth time by the robin outside in
    the yew tree…

    Just imagine how it must be for someone who is under the considerable
    mental anguish that accompanies a depressive state, and it becomes
    easier to postulate why this horrendous condition might have persisted
    over the millenia that it took for homo sapiens to evolve to their
    current state.

    (Cross-posted from Fluff 'n' Stuff)

  • A Tale Of Two Temblors

    AP report compares two recent earthquakes and their after effects – in Haiti and in Chile.

    Haiti-Chile Earthquake
     

  • The Pompous Path Of Moral Superiority

    Although he figures in the story, Tiger Woods is not the subject of this post. Self indulgent personal foibles of celebrities do not interest us. What strikes me as more interesting are the liberties that others take in spinning and analyzing the all too common clueless conduct of the privileged, in order to make agenda driven cultural points. The media frenzy that ensued following the sleazy  disclosures about Tiger's sex life was wholly expected. But still, I found it strange that the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, was asked to comment on the golf legend's fall from grace and his subsequent apology invoking his Buddhist roots. To his credit, the septuagenarian monk did not know anything about the tawdry tale of Tiger. After being "illuminated" by his inquisitors, he graciously said the following, defending the lessons taught by all faiths and not just Buddhism.

    …the Dalai Lama agreed with Woods in that he should rely on his faith to help repair his marriage. He added, “Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that’s important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.”

    Contrast that with some self appointed moral arbiters of the right wing media whose finger wagging at Tiger Woods included derision for Buddhism and the exhortation to embrace Christianity as a path to redemption. With such surefooted folks (of any religion, by the way) when one of their own fails, it is because he / she was not faithful to the message of the true god, but missteps by others are the consequence of adherence to a false faith (or no faith). Which is why the transgressions of Christian men of god like Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker and pedophile Catholic priests are deemed personal sins, not the indictment of the church or its doctrines whereas a Muslim terrorist or a Buddhist philanderer has to have been led astray by his respective faith. Particularly vituperative (and actually quite funny) is this Fox News report which made fun of Tiger and the Buddhist-Tantrik route to salvation.   

    If, as Samuel Johnson noted, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then religion is the emergency contingency plan of the discovered philanderer.

    Whether it's a president redefining "sexual relations" or a governor redefining "hiking the Appalachian Trail," you can bet there will be a huddle with a religious advisor followed by proclamations of rediscovered faith.

    So it came as no surprise as Tiger Woods wound down his prepared statement Friday that he invoked his Buddhist upbringing, lamented straying from its Eightfold (Cart) Path and vowed a return to adhering to the tenets of his religion.

    "Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security," said Woods. "It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously I lost track of what I was taught."

    And lost track. And lost track. And lost track. Presumably to the point of chafing.

    Tiger, you see, is Siddhartha, the Buddhist seeker accumulating human experience on his way to enlightenment. Dominating at Augusta, breaking Rocco Mediate's heart in a playoff, clandestine assignations with Jaimee Grubbs, Holly Sampson, Joslyn James, et al., were all part of his spiritual journey.

    How can you know where the Tantric Path leads if you don't go down it again and again and again? (And one has to admit there is an allure to a belief system that posits, "The hidden potency of sexual union is the seed of all creativity.")

    In Hermann Hesse's novel, young Siddhartha begins his journey by leaving the comforts of his Brahmin family and becoming an ascetic, denying himself all worldly pleasures.

    These are Tiger's solitary hours, days, years on the range, monotonously perfecting his game through mind-numbing – mind-clearing? – repetition. Self-denial and discipline, combined with his extraordinary talent, made Tiger the greatest golfer of all time.

    In Hesse's novel Siddhartha strays from the ascetic life of a Samana and indulges in matters of the flesh with the prostitute Kamala.

    "Siddhartha said nothing, and they played the game of love, one of the thirty or forty different games Kamala knew. Her body was flexible like that of a jaguar and like the bow of a hunter; he who had learned from her how to make love, was knowledgeable of many forms of lust, many secrets. For a long time, she played with Siddhartha, enticed him, rejected him, forced him, embraced him: enjoyed his masterful skills, until he was defeated and rested exhausted by her side."

    (Kamala wore out Siddhartha the way Hesse wore out commas.)

    Siddhartha emerges from this self-debasement, no doubt wobbly in the legs, and returns to the righteous path.

    And so, too, did Tiger disappear into a lust as deep as a St. Andrews pot bunker.

    Tiger didn't want to cut any corners on this leg of his journey. So he lay down repeatedly, exhaustively with, what, 14 Kamalas just to make sure the self-debasement took. This is not a guy who was ever going to be satisfied by a medium bucket.

    Okay, perhaps an apt and clever analogy. But Hesse's Siddhartha (a namesake of the Buddha) is a fictional character, the product of a  German novelist's overheated imagination and obsession with spirituality. Hesse described an almost identical path to self realization by a Christian seeker, a novice in a seminary, in another novel, Narziss and Goldmund. Hopefully, the next time a celebrity tomcat cries tears of contrition and takes "Jesus into his life," we will see a similar satirical comparison with Goldmund (and Christianity) who, having strayed from the straight and narrow of his Christian faith, "learnt" just like Tiger, from not just one Kamala, but a series of enticing lasses – in fact, almost each and every one that crossed his path.

    I am all for mocking hypocrites, including those who seek cover in religion. But let it be an even playing field for all prodigal children of god(s). 

    (Thanks to Sujatha for the link to the Fox News Sports report)

  • Senator McCain Is Bipartisan (Joe)

    This morning on Meet The Press, here's what McCain had to say, and I'm paraphrasing slightly: Trying to get or getting a few Republicans to get a 60-vote majority is not bipartisan.  I know bipartisanship.  Why don't we start over, sit down, and start with medical-malpractice reform and selling insurance across state lines?

    He later weaseled around on repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell despite his statement in 2006 that he would support doing so if military leadership supported it.  But if there's a thorough study that he decides he could trust and all of the military leadership in their official capacity supports repeal, then he would have to seriously consider supporting getting rid of it.

    Thoughts:

    1. I didn't realize "bipartisan" meant "doing only what the core of the minority party wants, and nothing more."
    2. I have less respect for John McCain, as a politician and as a person, than virtually any other politician in this country.  This interview reinforced that.  Maybe he should stick to investigating steroids in baseball, or else avoid media interactions where he has to explain himself.

  • Thé, Chai, Tea: flavors of populist uprisings (Narayan)

    The right wing Tea Party movement has come up a couple of times in our recent discussions. Narayan reflects on similar popular uprisings elsewhere.

    In an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled The Tea Party Last Time, Prof. Robert Zaretsky recalls a time in France when populist anger led to the rise of a grass-roots political movement.

    “MORE than 100,000 angry citizens united in the nation’s capital to take their country back: back from the tax collector and the political and financial elites, back from bureaucrats and backroom wheelers and dealers and, more elusively and alarmingly, back from those who, well, were not like them.”

    These were not Americans in revolt in 2009 but French protestors in 1950, followers of a disaffected shopkeeper named Pierre Poujade.  Who knew?  It is instructive to follow Zaretsky’s retelling of the trajectory of the Poujadist movement.  The elements of that movement are to be found today : unreasoned rage against politicians (the president in particular), taxes, and ‘foreigners’, and a willingness to swallow lies.

    My own history lesson comes from the early 60s when Bombay was in turmoil from a spate of water shortages that scarcely affected the richer sections of the city.  It served as a catalyst for a movement to oust ‘outsiders’ from the city for exacerbating the shortages. The easy victims of this thinking were South Indians in their enclaves of Matunga and Sion.  Riots, shop burning and killings ensued.  Nothing was resolved, but the movement resulted in the formation of the ultra-right Shiv Sena party whose early aim, ‘Maharashtra for Marathis’, progressed to ‘India for Hindus’ in a move for national legitimation.  The Shiv Sena’s activities throughout its existence are indistinguishable from thuggery.

    A few years earlier, in ‘58, our family’s move to Bombay was delayed by a few months by even worse violence prompted by regional jingoism. The army was called out by the prime minister to restore order and protect national interests – curfews and all.  The Jharkhand party in that instance went on to successfully demand autonomy for their homeland in the impoverished state of Bihar.  The new state is now probably in poorer shape than its parent.  

    Given their mass and momentum, it is inevitable that tea party parties are bound to achieve historical note.  But what do they portend in the long term?  The happening in Boston that gave a new twist to the leaf was exactly that – a happening.  Was it designed as representative of larger issues, or was the symbolism created after the event, grist for historians and the politically savvy?  I take courage from the fact that there is no tea – leaves, chests or bags – among our national symbols.

    “The election, though, proved to be Poujade’s swan song. He had demanded the nation’s ear, but once he and his fellow deputies had it, they had nothing substantive to say. Slogans and placards were poor preparation for governance, and the group’s rank and file soon either retreated from the political arena or joined the traditional right.”

    Zartesky’s history lesson is valuable and timely.  Change, whether the Obama type or anti-Obama, will come only when unavoidable and serve higher ideals than those espoused by the likes of Poujade and Thakre. I hope!