Accidental Blogger

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  • Preservation: A Modernist View

    AstrodomeMy hometown Houston is a modernist city. By that I don’t mean its shiny new suburbs and exurbs but the older public buildings that are all lines, angles and occasionally, futuristic domes. Unfortunately, local politicians and the builders who line their pockets, can’t wait to tear something down that is more than three or four decades old. There is always a fight going on between them and residents who want to preserve historic mid-century buildings and neighborhoods. Now that the Astros, Houston’s baseball team, have moved to the Minute Maid Park in downtown, the latest controversy is about what to do with the abandoned and forlorn Astrodome, the nation’s first modernist indoor sports stadium.  Most Houstonians don’t want it pulled down and would like to see it preserved as a sports and architectural legacy.  But there are others who would like it torn down to make room for yet another "modernist" parking lot for the Reliant Stadium next door where the Houston Texans play football.

    Instead of a book or a single newspaper/ magazine article, this post highlights an entire issue of a journal. Rather than focus on older classical edifices, the latest edition of Preservation, a magazine published by the The National Trust for Historic Preservation, turns a contemplative eye on America’s modernist architectural icons. The special issue devoted to the importance and difficulties of preserving modernist architecture, was brought to my attention by the magazine’s senior editor, Sudip Bose.

    What defines modernist architecture?  Bose explains.

    PreservationTrying to define modernism can be a frustrating exercise. As a style, it is less coherent, its boundaries looser, than, say, classicism. Many critics would argue that modernism is not even a singular style, that it incorporates a great variety of aesthetics and sensibilities. And just who were the modernists? Frank Lloyd Wright vehemently opposed being grouped with them, but modernist architecture would not have been the same without him.

    Modernism roughly spans the time between World War I and the early 1970s. What we generally think of as the modernist ethic evolved first in Europe, among such architects as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, the latter two of the German Bauhaus school. The European modernists imbued their work with an inherent morality and social consciousness and were often associated with left-wing politics. Intrigued by the emerging technologies of the day, they embraced concrete, glass, and steel in their revolutionary creations. They eschewed ornament, rejecting what they saw as the frivolous strokes of Victorian and art nouveau styles. Their work was both spare (think of Mies’ famous dictum "Less is more") and lyrical. Perhaps above all, they believed in function dictating form, though many architects, such as Le Corbusier, would eventually distance themselves from that tenet.

    In his thoughtful essay, The Modernist Manifesto, architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the New Yorker, presents his views on the crucial need to save modernist buildings.

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  • Lost in Translation? (Sujatha)

    Bw This recent review of a translated version of noted Urdu author Joginder Paul (Ruchira’s father-in-law) sparked the question: How much is being lost in translation?

    (Thanks to Ruchira for the link to the Library of Congress recordings and Bio. page)

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  • Cat Quote

    Seventy four adoring (and adorable) cat quotes by a mad poet – all of them apt!

    My favorites:

    19. For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
    42. For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
    70. For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.

    Note: Brought to the front from the comments section of a previous post. (Link: Dean)

  • “Apostrophe”

    Apostrophe Matt’s found sound – through punctuation. Should we give him "a posh trophy?"

    And here are some folks who have made the "apostrophe" their life’s misson.

  • Food, Fuel and Famine

    In recent days we have repeatedly heard news reports of the rising cost of food and food shortage. The effects have been mild to moderate in wealthy, developed nations like the US, more worrisome in Asia and severe in some poorer parts of the world. Namibia and Haiti have already seen food riots. The cause of the shortage and soaring prices are manifold, some of it brought about ironically, by rising standards of living in Asia and a proportionate increase in demand for food. 

    The recent issue of the Economist calls the burgeoning world food crisis The Silent Tsunami and suggests ways to bring it under control – generous aid from richer nations, scientific innovations for high yield crops, end of government interventions to manipulate international food markets and re-assessing the cost of biofuels .

    Food_pricesPICTURES of hunger usually show passive eyes and swollen bellies. The harvest fails because of war or strife; the onset of crisis is sudden and localised. Its burden falls on those already at the margin.

    Today’s pictures are different. “This is a silent tsunami,” says Josette Sheeran of the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency. A wave of food-price inflation is moving through the world, leaving riots and shaken governments in its wake. For the first time in 30 years, food protests are erupting in many places at once. Bangladesh is in turmoil (see article); even China is worried (see article). Elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen in democracies.

    Famine traditionally means mass starvation. The measures of today’s crisis are misery and malnutrition. The middle classes in poor countries are giving up health care and cutting out meat so they can eat three meals a day. The middling poor, those on $2 a day, are pulling children from school and cutting back on vegetables so they can still afford rice. Those on $1 a day are cutting back on meat, vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford one bowl. The desperate—those on 50 cents a day—face disaster.

    Among the many causes cited in the article, the alarm bell about the negative effects of diverting staple crops like corn, wheat and soy to manufacture fuel has been sounded by many in the past. Not only has the practice made those crops too expensive for poor people who depend on them for food, it has also raised the price of other staples like rice because farmers are increasingly choosing to grow crops for fuel rather than for food. While the idea surrounding ethanol as the clean-green fuel has gained successful foothold in wealthier nations concerned about pollution and global warming, biofuels are coming under increasing attack in less affluent countries. 

    (See also Anna’s article of February 2006 where among other things, she argued that ethanol as the affordable and environmentally friendly fuel is a notion that is mostly bunk, promoted by the corn lobby)

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  • Dukh-Pain: A Review

    "And a flower is crying / Along with the Roma"

    Reading DUKH / PAIN by Hedina Tahirovic Sijercic – Sukrita Paul Kumar

    Dukh_pain_2The very title of Hedina Tahirovic Sijercic’s Dukh/Pain draws me as an Indian to this book of poems.  The bi-lingual title does not merely suggest a linguistic proximity to Indian languages but much more. Philosophically, the word “dukh” echoes the cultural import of the Buddhist/ Pali word “dukkha.” The word “pain” gets loaded with greater meaning and intensity, linked side by side with “dukh”.

    The simplicity of Hedina’s poems is indeed deceptive. These poems reflect the dukh of a long history of discrimination, persecution and prejudice against the “wandering” Roma. But even while they have been on the move, they have carried within themselves their beliefs, myths, way of life and even superstitions. While Hedina’s poems celebrate harmony with the non-Roma people in a dream, they also play with the metaphor of “fleeing” from the nightmare of being bitten by “Big-headed, winged, red insects” (“I Flee”). The continuous persecution of the Roma is recorded in the history of their expulsions, through the “Caravan Law” of Hamburg, their exclusion from social life, denial of social welfare and a whole series of humiliations suffered in  Europe and elsewhere. It is as if the poems in “Dukh/Pain” articulate the pregnant silences of the suffering : “In a dream my child speaks,/ awake, he doesn’t want to speak./ …My child cries,/ I do not know what pain is.” And yet, it is only the mother who can probably understand the meaning of that cry!

    Hedina’s verses are the voice of the insider, so full of the pain of her people that for her “….it is suffocating/Sorrow has smothered my soul,/ and it is sinking” (“Sorrow”). The energy emanating from the poems flows towards healing. There is also a quest to know the truth of the multiple histories of their plight in different places. It is quite evident that in this decade of Roma inclusion (2005-2015), while poetry can help heal the physical and psychological wounds inflicted, it can also create a suitable sensitivity to the demeaning mis-recognition of their identity.

    “I am a stranger to myself”, says Hedina in one of the poems. While there is the constant experience of being an “alien”- in exile even, in the country of birth, there is also an acute desire to retain whatever cultural heritage they are left with. In the poem “Amanet for Daughter”, the poet entrusts the daughter with the task of passing on the Romani culture to the next generation: “…Endow her with the charge/ As I endow you.” This alertness to pass on the mother tongue for instance, to ensure the survival of the Roma identity, actually brings out the pride of the Roma despite the stigmatization afflicted on them as “gypsies”. It is difficult not to notice the faith of the poet in the Romni (woman), usually the mother-figure: it is the Roma women who must “save the earth”, it is they who must transmit their culture to the future generations and it is they who can protect the Roma when even the flowers “cry along with” them!

    "My voice is imprisoned/ I can’t talk”, says Hedina when in fact this book of poems gives us her voice in two tongues: her poems are a release from captivity of place and time, from the bitter memories of  Bosnia, of a painful burden of history….  But she has to move on: "I have to go from here./I have to go there./ I have to get better." It is with such conviction that in the poem “I Have To Go From Here”, the poet declares her freedom to actually connect with her essential self – the wandering Roma! This reminds me of the book The Roads of the Roma: A Pen Anthology of Gypsy Writers which introduces one to the many roads taken by the Roma after leaving India in the eighth century. The outpourings of the writers help demystify their lives, making it easier for the rest of the world to shed irrational associations built around the Roma identity.

    Reading “Dukh/Pain” is an experience of traveling inside the world of the Roma, to partake of their “dukh” and celebrate the vibrant togetherness despite the sufferings caused by wide dispersal.

    Editor’s Note:

    Thanks Sukrita, for the review.  Dukh-Pain, a book of Roma poetry was featured here some months ago. (some of Sukrita’s own poems here)

  • “M.F.A. is the new M.B.A.” (Dean)

    When a car company like G.M. is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.

    Rather than extend a discussion in which I’ve been a vociferous—maybe even loudmouth—participant below the comment line of Ruchira’s post regarding poet-doctor Fady Joudah, I thought I’d take her and Joe’s suggestions to address in a new post a recent related article in the New York Times. In my comments to the former post, I’ve been trying to defend the vocation of poet against its marginalization and appropriation within an ethos of scientific mastery. With respect to Joudah, I detected an implication in the article and in Ruchira’s comments that his poetry could be no more than an afterthought—a quaint, refreshing occasion of self-expression and incisive poetic observation, but clearly secondary—to his demanding day job, and that while a rigorous scientific pursuit such as medical science can muster the cognitive wherewithal to appropriate, master, apply, and create poetry, the converse does not obtain. I maintain that such an implication is wholly in error.

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  • “To Have Lived This Long”

    An interesting poem by Maurice Leiter – of life examined and punches pulled.

    To have lived this long in admiration of children authors of the book of
         laughter cartographers of the map of solutions whose commentary can
         always be trusted
    To have lived this long in fealty to women without understanding them yet
          knowing their value as they melt or harden with the changing seasons
    To have lived this long scowling at the genuflectors the cringers the
         clingers the gossips especially the barren patriots
    To have lived this long among these barbarians even perhaps to have
          supported them by inaction to have tutted and tsked but not to have
    risked my body …..

    More here.

  • The Debate Debacle

    I didn’t watch last Wednesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. From what I have read and heard since, I gather that the debate was more of a "gotcha" game of distractions than substantive questioning of the two candidates. The media critique of the two moderators, George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson of ABC, has been mostly negative.  With the Democratic Party nomination process being extended beyond common expectations and with the two candidates (and one prominent spouse) willing to throw barbs at each other, over ambitious, smart alecky and boorish journalists are in hog heaven this year and are practically salivating to outdo each other in latching onto every silly turn that this long campaign has taken.

    More interesting to me than what the bloviating pundits have to say is what American voters, particularly those in Pennsylvania where the primary takes place next Tuesday, think about the media created political circus. I came across a sampling of viewers’ response to the debate in Thursday’s issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 20 out of 22 comments rated the debate as frivolous sham. Most readers appear annoyed with the moderators for their less than professional line of questioning and with Clinton for playing along.

    Pleased though I am by the public reaction to ABC’s ham handed hatchet job, I can’t help harboring a slight suspicion that some of the outrage too may be a bit of a sham.  Do most voters really feel upset by the sorry spectacle of journalistic sleaze or do they want to believe that they do?  Is there a brand of Bradley Effect at work here too?  Despite all the negative comments about Hillary’s merry mud slinging, I have a feeling that she will pull off a double digit victory in Pennsylvania. Of the several tons of dirt she has heaped on Obama’s personal credibility and character, at least a few kilos are bound to stick.

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  • A Poet Without Borders

    "Even though my poems don’t seem to be happy, I think I like to sing."  Fady Joudah

    Fady Joudah is a poet from my neck of the woods.  The winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Joudah is not exactly a run-of-the-mill poet.  His taxing day job makes his poetic pursuit a true labor of love. (I mean, when does he find the time?) An emergency room physician in Houston’s Michael DeBakey VA Medical Center, he has chalked up a couple of "firsts" with his poetry award.  He is the first physician and first Arab American poet to be honored with the prestigious prize.

    The son of displaced Palestinian Arab parents, Joudah is a native Texan born in Austin in 1971. His peripatetic life has taken him to many parts of the world. Schooled in the middle east and the US, he has cared for refugees in war torn Africa as a physician for Doctors Without Borders and has now returned to Texas to tend to the health care needs of the veterans of our armed forces. His poetry reflects the sharp caring eye of a physician who tends to individual pain and the mind of a poet who recognizes universal suffering. Joudah’s book of poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic is now available in bookstores and on Amazon.

    Fady_joudahThe classroom can certainly be a site of pain, but poet Fady Joudah’s day job involves contact with suffering of a more elemental sort. He’s an emergency-room physician at Houston’s Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center.

    He’s also done two stints as a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, in refugee camps in Africa. As a Palestinian-American, the son of refugees himself, there’s a certain irony in that, not lost on the author. Joudah, in his poetry, writes about those who are stateless and those who suffer, and tries desperately to do it without condescension or false simplification.

    You can see an inevitability to how Joudah became a poetry-writing physician. Drawn early to literature and science, he was encouraged in both by his parents. Although he grew up mostly in the Middle East, he’s a Texas native, born in Austin in 1971, the second of five children. His father was 14 in 1948 when he fled Palestine following the creation of the state of Israel. Joudah’s mother, whose family hailed from the same village, was born in 1949 in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.

    Joudah’s father eventually emigrated to the United States to finish a doctorate in history, returning to Gaza to marry Joudah’s mother. The family moved to Austin, where the elder Joudah taught at the University of Texas for a year before accepting teaching positions first in Libya, then in Saudi Arabia, where Joudah attended junior high and high school.

    His father introduced him early to classic Arabic poetry — reciting lines, talking about technique, linking those beloved poems with his own life as a boy. "I always had the feeling that poetry comes through us in a very mythical, legendary way because it forms our experiences," Joudah said.

    His own first efforts to write came in middle school. But medicine attracted him as well. His father gave him a shrewd piece of advice, Joudah said. "He reminds me to this day that he kept telling me, ‘Son, you can always be a writer or a poet after you become a doctor, but if you become a poet, you can’t become a man of science.’ He reminds me that was one of the wisest things he ever told me."

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  • Campaigning in Style

    I am currently in the throes of a blogger’s block and a fading but persistent back ache. Hopefully I will be able to write something thoughtful in the next couple of days, instead of just fulminating about the Democratic primaries in the comments section of my co-authors’ posts.

    Today I will leave you with a photo of a street scene in India where an energetic "Get Out the Vote" effort is under way. Election season seems to bring more fun elsewhere than what our presidential candidates are handing out this year.

    Campaign_india_3 (click for enlargement) 

  • Obama, the Liberal (Joe)

    There’s an interesting post up at Obsidian Wings about the backlash to Obama’s recent remarks about working-class Pennsylvanians.  The theory, essentially, is: "pin it on liberal self-loathing." 

    [F]ar too many liberals — particularly circa 2002-03 — had internalized the view that they were snobby, that they were elitist, that they were too anti-religion, or that they were insufficiently patriotic in the eyes of the American public. It’s not so much that they actually were any of these things (at least in any great number). It’s that they feared (deeply feared) being perceived in this way by the American public. To borrow from Dylan, a lot of issues came and went, but the Great Dirty Hippie never escaped their mind.

    This curious self-loathing — the shame and guilt associated with perfectly valid and moral views — explains the rush to “condemn the marginal” in the lead up to war. It’s quite telling that, as the country marched off to a horribly misguided war, many liberal skeptics were more concerned with clarifying that they were not mindlessly liberal hippie pacifists. In doing so, they gave considerable political cover to the war advocates. . . .

    The 2005 Social Security debate provides another great example of this dynamic. . . . I got the sense that individual journalists and pundits — particularly Tim Russert — cared more about proving their non-hippie bona fides than about the substance of an extremely reckless proposed change to the most successful, efficient government program in American history. Rather than looking closely how many people depend upon the Social Security system, they chose to draw a line in the sand and say “here is where I’ll prove I’m not a wild liberal.” In doing so, and similarly to Iraq, people like Russert put the burden of proof on Democrats to explain what (unnecessary) changes they would propose.

    Turning back to Obama, this same dynamic explains the intense reaction to his words. Among liberals, there’s this ever-present fear that Obama — record-setting, charismatic Obama — is always teetering on the edge of collapse. To you, I say “chill out.” He’s a tough, resilient candidate as he’s shown again and again. But among always-nervous guilty liberals, Obama’s inartful wording portends not merely a bad press cycle or two, but electoral collapse because it fulfills the elitist stereotypes they live in mortal terror of.

    There’s a lot of interesting and important stuff in there about "liberals" (or is it "progressives" these days?) being terrified of being identified as liberals, and consequently rejecting the "fringe left" in voices more than a touch too loud.

    That said, I don’t think this explanation is complete.  If it had been John Kerry, then maybe; but it wasn’t, it was Barack Obama.  And when a biracial senator gunning to be the real "first black President" (sorry, Bill) is involved, you have to at least tip your cap to the racial dynamic.  In the United States at the start of the twenty-first century, it’s always about race.