Recently in Quotations Category

A friend from work loaned me Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta, which I started reading this morning and haven't been able to put down. This passage, about the Jogeshwari slums, struck me as being particularly relevant to the sorts of things I've been thinking about lately (about which, perhaps, more later):

I couldn't use the public toilets. I tried, once. There were two rows of of toilets. Each one of them had masses of shit, overflowing out of the toilets and spread liberally all around the cubicle. Fore the next few hours that image and that stench stayed with me, when I ate, when I drank. It''s not merely an esthetic discomfort; typhoid runs rampant through the slum and spreads through oral -- fecal contact. ...

There are two million people without access to latrines in Bombay. You can see them every morning along the train tracks, trudging with a tumbler of water, looking for a vacant place to squat. It is a terrible thing, a degrading thing, for a woman to be forced to look every morning for a little privacy to go to the toilet or to clean herself while she's menstruating. No city this rich should make its women suffer this way. The women of this slum were luckier. They had toilets built by the municipality, but they were full, and the municipality wasn't doing anything about unblocking them. ...

Mehta goes on to describe how a committee of Jogeshwari women pressed for cleaner toilets, then better water, rights for "divorced-divorced-divorced" Muslim women, and more. Mehta writes,

If there is hope for Bombay, it is in this group of slum women, all illiterate, and others like them. Issues of infrastructure are not abstract problems for them. Much more than the men, the women have to deal with such issues firsthand. If you want to make sure that the money you send to a poor place will be spent properly, give it to the women who live there.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with that conclusion or the evidence used to support it: certainly, women have put up with far shabbier infrastructures for centuries and accepted it as entirely normal -- indeed, would rebel against something more sophisticated. Mehta also writes,

I asked one of the Jegeshwari women if she wouldn't rather live in a decent apartment than the slum she lived in now, with the open gutter outside and the absence of indoor plumbing. Yes, there was a building planned nearby to resettle the slum dwellers. But people from her neighborhood wouldn't move there. "There's too much aloneness. A person can die behind closed doors of a flat and no one will know. Here," she observed with satisfaction, "there are a lot of people."

Not exactly evidence of a feminine demand for better infrastructure...

Turned to this on the Metro on the way home:

As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta's account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopex and printed at Frankfurt in 1598. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher's shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connection with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique gastronomy.

From The Picture in the House. I also note that there's now a federal government program to boost the economy by allowing citizens to purchase Cthulhu idols...

From the book on Shaw:

All that was true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly to be called a good thing.

Somewhere (perhaps I can find it on the shelf ... though it's not where I thought it would be ... in The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, Third Series, edited by George Plimpton) I have a translation of an interview conducted with the French poet Jean Cocteau shortly before his death. Cocteau, a polymath if there ever was one, was living in a house filled with manuscripts, sculptures, line drawings, paintings, ceramics, books and other things he'd made with his own hands. The interviewer asked him, if the house were to catch fire, and he could save only one thing, what would be? Cocteau replied, without missing a beat,

"Oh, definitely, the fire!"

One doesn't need reasons to love Shaw, but he nevertheless provides us with so many of them. Here is another deduced by Chesterton:

Roughly speaking, Schopenhauer maintained that life is unreasonable. The intellect, if it could be impartial, would tell us to cease; but a blind partiality, an instinct quite distinct from thought, drives us on to take desperate chances in an essentially bankrupt lottery. Shaw seems to accept this dingy estimate of the rational outlook, but adds a somewhat arresting comment. Schopenhauer had said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for all living things." Shaw said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for reason." Life is the higher call, life we must follow. It may be that there is some undetected fallacy in reason itself. Perhaps the whole man cannot get inside his own head any more than he can jump down his own throat. But there is about the need to live, to suffer, and to create that imperative quality which can truly be called supernatural, of whose voice it can indeed be said that it speaks with authority, and not as the scribes.

This is the first and finest item of the original Bernard Shaw creed: that if reason says that life is irrational, life must be content to reply that reason is lifeless; life is the primary thing, and if reason impedes it, then reason must be trodden down into the mire amid the most abject superstitions.

Life is the important thing--something that my own life is proving to me with a sad empiricism. Nothing demonstrates so well the subordination of reason to life as seeing family and close friends struggle and suffer with illness and with death,

...from G.K. Chesterton. The first is a line with a wonderfully oxymoron:

Only those who have stooped to be in advance of their time will ever find themselves behind it.

The second I'm not quite as sure about; certainly it's true of some of Shaw's plays, but not all (Man and Superman springs immediately to mind):

Shaw wrote Cæsar and Cleopatra; Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra and also Julius Cæsar. And exactly what annoys Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare's version is this: that Shakespeare has an open mind or, in other words, that Shakespeare has really written a problem play. Shakespeare sees quite as clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and ineffectual; but he also sees, what is quite as plain and practical a fact, that these ineffectual men do capture the hearts and influence the policies of mankind. Shaw would have nothing said in favour of Brutus; because Brutus is on the wrong side in politics. Of the actual problem of public and private morality, as it was presented to Brutus, he takes actually no notice at all. He can write the most energetic and outspoken of propaganda plays; but he cannot rise to a problem play. He cannot really divide his mind and let the two parts speak independently to each other. He has never, so to speak, actually split his head in two; though I daresay there are many other people who are willing to do it for him.

I think this last bit is wrong -- it seems to me that John Tanner and Ann Whitefield would split a mind in two; it also seems to me that Shaw's characters, whether Cleopatra or Captain Bluntschli, the intensely pragmatic professional mercenary, in Arms and the Man require a certain amount of schizophrenia. Shaw's problems may all work out the way he intends (I would argue that they just as often don't), but he also breathes so much life into each of his characters that it is fairer to say that Shaw splits himself not in half, but into a thousand splinters, each with its own motives and character.

Borges wrote of Shaw:

The biography of Bernard Shaw by Frank Harris contains an admirable letter by the former, from which I copy the following words: "I understand everything and everyone and thus I am nothing and no one." From this nothingness (so comparable to that of God before creating the world, so comparable to that primordial divinity which another Irishman, Johannes Scotus Erigena, called Nihil), Bernard Shaw educed almost innumerable persons or dramatis personae: the most ephemeral of these is, I suspect, that G. B. S. who represented him in public and who lavished in the newspaper columns so many facile witticisms.

While I wait for the cat to get home (it's a cold night), a few words on inversion.

One of the real pleasures of reading The Bible Unearthed is the frisson of hearing another side of the story. The wickedness of Ahab and Jezebel is transformed into an account of...well, here's a fragment:

The true character of Israel under the Omrides [the dynasty that included Ahab--id] involves an extraordinary story of military might, architectural achievement, and (as as can be determined) administrative sophistication. Omri and his successors earned the hatred of the Bible precisely because they were so strong, precisely because they succeeded in transforming the northern kingdom into an important regional power that completely overshadowed the poor, marginal, rural-pastoral kingdom of Judah to the south. The possibility that the Israelite kings who consorted with the nations, married foreign women, and built Canaanite-type shrines and palaces would prosper was both unbearable and unthinkable.

Moreover, from the perspective of the late monarchic Judah, the internationalism and openness of the Omrides was sinful. To become entangled with the ways of the neighboring peoples was, according to the seventh century Deuteronomistic theology, a direct violation of divine command. But a lesson could still be learned from that experience. By the time of the compilation of the books of Kings, history's verdict had already been returned. The Omrides had been overthrown and the kingdom of Israel was no more. Yet with the help of archaeological evidence and the testimony of outside sources, we can now see how the vivid scriptural portraits that doomed Omri, Ahab and Jezebel to ridicule and scorn over the centuries skillfully concealed the real character of the first true kingdom of Israel.

When I was in high school, some friends and I started an underground newspaper. We had a lot of fun, wrote and published some funny things. One of my favorites came in response to a school Christmas concert that featured a number of traditional songs like Silent Night. We proposed, for the sake of balance, that there be a companion event with songs like "Om Om Om, yeah yeah yeah," "Good God There is No God" and "Sing a Song of Satan." Much of it was pretty juvenile stuff -- I wrote a piece comparing a clique with the Archies comic characters.

All too predictably, of course, we ran afoul of the school administration, leading to a hearing with some administrators and, I seem to recall, the school board. The mother of one of my co-publishers defended our efforts, leading a school board member to ask what kind of a parent could possibly defend -- and he read something from one of the articles that probably wasn't on a par with the New Yorker. Her son leapt to her defense ("I wasn't going to let him rag on my mom," he later said) and explained, "I think the point my mom is making is like Voltaire. She may not agree with everything we say, but she'll defend our right to say it." (Voltaire's attitude was a bit more forceful.)

The board member responded, "I think we know a little more than Voltaire."

And so, apparently, do the Human Rights Commissions of Canada, which have extralegally claimed jurisdiction over the inalienable right of free speech and free press. I have a horror of any restriction on freedom of speech beyond the very narrow and well defined exception for shouting fire in a crowded theater. Contrary to his exalted view of himself, our school board member was a pinhead all on his own--one need not have compared him to Voltaire to find him wanting.

Ezra Levant, publisher of the now defunct print edition of the Western Standard, has been hauled before one of the Human Rights Commission to defend himself for publishing. We need not offer a predicate: the right to publish what one wants, whether it be essays on Shakerspeare's sonnets or racist bilge or pornography of the most vile sort, is a fundamental right. Making fun of a religion (I am beginning to think of it as a duty) also enjoys absolute freedom.

I am thrilled to see Levant defend himself -- it's well worth watching. I doubt I would share much of his politics, and chances are he wouldn't much care for many of my views, but I liked his opening statement.

The man behind Ideofact most likely has an IQ between 100 and 145, is either a university graduate who enjoyed his liberal arts educations so much he wants to keep up with the things he studied as a student or an autodidact who deeply resents university culture. He is probably the sort of fastidious person who shelves all his books by dividing them into subject and then alphabetizing them who nevertheless may so abandon himself to his intellectual passions that he allows unread books to pile up on his desk, his bar, by his bed and even in his bed...

And so on. Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating piece in the New Yorker about the inadequacies of profiling, the art of looking at a crime scene and deducing from it useful information about the perpetrator. Gladwell writes of a UK group that tested some of the FBI profilers' most cherished assumptions:

...the Liverpool group selected a hundred stranger rapes in the United Kingdom, classifying them according to twenty-eight variables, such as whether a disguise was worn, whether compliments were given, whether there was binding, gagging, or blindfolding, whether there was apologizing or the theft of personal property, and so on. They then looked at whether the patterns in the crimes corresponded to attributes of the criminals—like age, type of employment, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, number of prior convictions, type of prior convictions, and drug use. Were rapists who bind, gag, and blindfold more like one another than they were like rapists who, say, compliment and apologize? The answer is no—not even slightly.

“The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons,” Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the F.B.I.’s approach, says. “You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.”

It turns out that the art of profiling isn't much different than the art of the sideshow fortune teller. Gladwell summarizes the profile the FBI came up with for the BTK killer:

Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental.

More from Jessica Mitford's 1973 book Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business. In these excerpts, she notes that prison parole authorities based a convict's sentence on various factors--including crimes for which one had never been convicted or even charged:

The man who has pleaded not guilty at his trial, and who continues to assert his innocence of the crime for which he was sentenced -- or even one who refuses to admit guilt for a crime for which he was charged and acquitted -- is liable to be in particularly severe trouble. "You've got your 'cop-out sheet' with you, showing what you've done in the past year: vocational training, church attendance, and the like, but you may never have a chance to bring out any of that. The board member asks: 'How do you feel now about the crime you committed?' You answer: 'I'm sorry it happened. I was drunk at the time. I guess I lost my head. But I have a trade now. I've only one beef against me--failure to tuck my shirt in when ordered to do so by an officer.' The member: 'I like the looks of your file, you're handling yourself pretty well. But what of the 1961 burglary?' You protest you were innocent of that. He says that's not what the police said. You get into a hassle -- and very soon your few minutes of time are up. There are no further questions, the panel tells you, 'We'll let you know.'" [says an ex-convict interviewed by Mitford.]

The indeterminate sentence law gives the Adult Authority [the parole board in California] the power to inflict any punishment it deems fit for these unproved crimes, its decision often based on hearsay in the form of letters from prosecutors or police agencies. Lawyers can cite dozens of cases in which a frustrated D.A., unable to secure a conviction, gets his man in the end anyway. Example: an eighteen-year-old black is sentenced to a five-to-life term for a holdup in which no violence occurred and nobody was hurt. He is eligible for parole at the end of twenty months, and, as a first offender with a blameless prison record, has every reason to expect his sentence to be set accordingly. But there is a letter in his file from the district attorney advising the Adult Authority that he is actually a vicious killer. The district attorney had charged him with a double murder (unconnected with the holdup), and although he was unable to get a conviction after three jury trials, he says he knows the prisoner was guilty and will kill again if freed. Year after year the prisoner comes before the Adult Authority, year after year parole is denied and his sentence, unset, remains at life. He has no opportunity to defend himself--he is not even allowed to see the allegations against him in the D.A.'s latter. At age thirty-three, he is released, having served about eight years more than the average time given a convicted first-degree murderer, and fourteen years more than the average sentence for a robbery first offender.

And so it was in 1973. Now we have mandatory minimums, three strikes you're out, and other enhancements ...