Bhava and Beef Tea

“Never Let Me Go” sneaked up and grabbed me quite insidiously. I read the first part of it without much attention, between other books, with a result that I had even less an idea of what was going on than the author intended. I even thought I must be so completely out of touch with English culture that I didn’t understand all this talk of “donors” and “carers”. Of course if I’d been paying more attention, I would have caught on earlier. But it’s a great device, none the less, that the author employs when Miss Lucy tells the kids that they’ve been told, but not really told. And, of course, the same is true of us, the readers.

It’s a wonderful thing about imaginative fiction that it can stray into impossible, unrealistic situations and resonate all the more deeply because of that. Someone touched on this the other day when discussing Murakami. So, when reading this novel by Ishiguro, I couldn’t help thinking of real situations in which in which humans are treated with cynical contempt, while their humanity remains as a silent accusation against those who cause and sometimes indeed benefit from their suffering. Locally, I think of Palestinian refugee children. In India I might think of street urchins.

In real life situations, there’s the danger of bhava clouding the imagination, and drawing connections where there should not be any. When a person stands before us in suffering, it’s easy to think of other suffering persons we have known, or make him a symbol of all the suffering in the world, so that what we actually see is not the one before us, but something entirely unconnected to him. When this happens, it becomes impossible to give such a person the particular sort of attention that might be of real help. I think this is the difference between pity and compassion. Compassion is a state of greater alertness, perceptiveness and intelligence.

Good writers like Ishiguro avoid maudlin scenes that spin us into tears. At no point in Never Let Me Go was I moved to tears, and yet the book quietly penetrated my soul. I felt for the characters as if they were real, and of course they are real in a certain sense. As for the situation, there is little room for doubt that we humans would permit similar horrors to occur.

I just went back to read the story of Kasturbai Gandhi and her rejection of beef tea. I don’t know about the beef tea, but I think I’d prefer to be put out of my misery than accept Kathy’s kidney – first or second.

I think I’m becoming mild, or balmy

I think I’m becoming mild, or balmy. I actually like the “new look” in Gmail; can’t work up strong opinions about it like Dave Winer did yesterday. I also use fastmail.fm, at $40 a year, and that’s just fine too. Its new beta interface took a page out of Gmail’s book and in some ways improved upon it. I thought it would help me to break the dependence on Google, but fat chance: it’s just a frivolous luxury.

I like my new ThinkPad X120e , even though it comes with Windows 7. One day I’ll probably change it to Ubuntu, just as I’ve done with all my other computers. But for now it’s fine. I like that it suspends or hibernates and dependably comes back to life, unlike every Linux computer I’ve owned.

My ThinkPad has only an 11 inch screen, but it’s easier to lug around with me than my previous 13-inch. I didn’t believe it before, but an 11-inch screen – unlike a 10-inch screen – is still big enough. The ThinkPad has a marvelous keyboard, runs for five or six hours on battery, and costs two and a half times less than an Apple product. It’s not as light or as powerful as one of those, but it’s perfectly adequate for my needs, and I won’t be as distressed if it goes missing like those 1,500 laptops that (according to the British Airways in-flight magazine) are disappeared each day in British airports. (I think it’s more likely to be nabbed on one of my India trips.)

To the ThinkPad I added Office 2010 so I can share documents a little more reliably. It’s not as nice, or easy to use as LibreOffice, and starts almost as slowly, but there are a couple of advantages, like you can pin documents you use often to the Recents list. Oh, and the right mouse button context menu (though it occasionally does the weirdest things).

I like my new IPhone. It’s a lot simpler to use than my old Blackberry. The phone calls are crystal clear when they aren’t disconnected after 2 seconds. I’ll probably end up reading more books on it than my new Kobo. I also listen to music more often on it than on other devices, and I definitely won’t bother buying another camera. On the other hand, if I had to actually buy an Iphone (and not receive one from work) I probably wouldn’t spend that amount of money. Those old monochrome Nokias with a one-inch screen and batteries that last about 3 weeks aren’t half-bad either.

I’m making an experiment and leaving my eye glasses in my pocket or at home. That means I don’t have to spend every morning looking for them in the most absurd places. I can see most everything I want to see without my glasses and fortunately I don’t need to drive a car every day. I also notice that when I don’t put my eye glasses on for a part of the day, my vision is clearer without them for the rest of the day. Maybe all these years I didn’t really need to wear glasses after all. Primary School blackboards are the best friend of the world’s opticians and optometrists. Maybe one day when every child owns a laptop, the eye doctors will go out of business. Or at least stop forcing six year olds into glasses.

Literature

Reading 1Q84 took me about 3 months, at my usual easy pace of 10 pages a day. With interruptions: when I traveled to America for 10 days I left it at home, not wanting to schlep such a heavy tome in my bags. I’m a painfully slow reader, though somehow I seem to plod through thick volumes more readily than thin ones.

Not that length really matters in a novel. I wonder if writers ever consider how long they intend a book to be before writing: it seems to me that a novel needs to be just as long as it needs to be and not longer. I can’t imagine 1Q84 being written as a shorter novel.

In terms of structure, it’s probably the most perfect of all the novels I’ve read by Murakami. Sometimes I’ve felt a little bit lost in his longer ones, even irritated.

Actually I found myself growing a little irritated with him earlier today. I wasn’t sure I trusted him. I decided to adjourn my judgment till the end of the novel. Perhaps he was planning some bizarre ending that no one would understand? But I needn’t have worried. A story as bizarre as this does not require a bizarre denouement. It requires that normalcy will be restored.

Earlier today, though, another thing, perhaps, was bothering me too. The way that the novelist sets himself up as a God. Everything is determined by the Master’s stroke of the pen. The rest of us just have to go along with this. He’s the Perceiver, and we are the Receivers – on the unlikely assumption that I understand Murakami’s terminology correctly.

There is Sruti and there is Smriti, to use another terminology. The Sruti is “what has been seen” by the Rishis – the Vedic seers, whereas Smriti, is “what has been remembered”. The latter was recorded by mere men (even if, like the Gita, dictated by Gods). The novelist in this kind of novel (1Q84), where reality is not subject to ordinary rules, has more the role of the Rishi. The reader’s role is to take the words of the novelist and recreate the story in his imagination. But this license only extends so far, as does the range of interpretation. “Literature is not a free-for-all,” said an English literature professor once, irked by my Buddhist interpretation of Canterbury Tales.

However, I’m beginning to feel constrained by the circle of these novelists’ words. As if I want to break free and write my own book of life. To do so, of course, I would need divine inspiration, and then it won’t technically be mine anyway, will it?

Finally, irritated or not, if I’m having these thoughts, it can only be thanks to Murakami. Thanks to him we know that there is “only ever one reality,” though “things may not be as they seem”. They may veil truths that can be revealed only by imagination.

Kali Yuga

Five minutes into reading my twitter stream I learned of the rape of a five year old in Delhi, the rape of a young mother in Gurgaon, and of a girl in Morocco who committed suicide after being forced to marry her rapist.

Meanwhile in Sri Lanka, which I’ve been thinking of visiting, I read about the spate of “white van abductions”, in the tradition of Michael Ondaatji’s “Anil’s Ghost”.

A new survey in India reveals that more that while more than half the population lack toilets, a higher percentage owns a mobile phone. A frightening percentage lack access to untreated drinking water (as was mentioned also in a WHO survey). They said in that WHO survey that while enormous progress had been made in Africa and other areas of the world, with regard to access to cleaner drinking water and public sanitation, India was holding back the global success rates.

I survived for a longer time on Twitter than on the the Channel 2 TV news tonight, which was upbeat over Israel’s successes in Gaza. The killing of 25 “terrorists” (they actually said that) gave The Chief of Staff the opportunity to tell us that whenever the enemy strike at us, we’ll hit them back even harder. It has already been forgotten that Israel started the current round.

While the 25 terrorists remained nameless, the reportage moved on to cover the residents of the south as they begin to emerge from their shelters and get back to a normal life, but by that time we had switched off the news to eat our dinner in peace. In the same spirit, I’m going to try to get back to sleep. It’s a mistake to read Twitter in the night.

Living in towers

The TV carried a travel feature on Georgia (the country). In ancient mountain villages every house has its own high stone tower. No one remembers exactly why these were built. One theory is that the towers would protect the villagers from the danger of avalanches. But it seems unlikely that every village was equally subject to that danger. A more likely theory is that the towers were built due to the popular (and surviving) custom of vendetta.

After dark, each family would place a wooden ladder against the wall of their tower, climb the three meters to its single portal, then haul the ladder in after them. That way they could be assured of a sound night’s sleep, confident that their neighbors wouldn’t murder them while they slumbered.

What a distance we’ve traveled since those dark days! We no longer need stone towers to protect us from our fellow men. The technology has significantly improved.

Scowling and Japanese Culture

Saw “Departures” last night, a film about a man who accidentally gets a job as a mortician. It’s a great film (I see it won the Oscar for the best foreign language film in 2008). Anyway, thinking about it today I was reflecting on how scowls and frowns seem to be so highly developed in Japanese culture. The heroine of the Murakami I’m currently reading, “1Q84” has a very expansive scowl; many of those Ukiyo-e style drawings show characters with theatrical scowls; as do Japanese masks; and some of the Japanese people I have known have had wonderful comic frowns too. I’m sure there is some deeper significance that people more familiar with Japanese culture can point to.
frowning Ukiyo-e character

Mutt and Hebrew

Some of my problems with Mutt are a result of having occasionally to use Hebrew. On Linux, Mutt will work passably in any terminal and permit the reading of Hebrew emails. It needs only to have “bidiv” installed and defined in .muttrc. The limitations are that: (a) RTL subject lines will be backward (b) Both rtl and ltr emails will appear on the left-hand side of the page, (c) an rtl enabled editor must be used, and (d) Some email clients, such as Yahoo and Fastmail deal poorly with rtl plain-text messages. They will be aligned in the left margin with end of sentence punctuation on the wrong side. Messages that contain single ltr words will appear with the sentence order garbled.

If one wants a more complete multilingual environment for Mutt, there seems to be only the mlterm multilingual console. In mlterm, it is necessary to disable bidiv in .muttrc. Then rtl subject lines will be correct, reading of rtl emails will be easier, and it is possible to choose from a number of different console text editors such as Emacs, Vim and Mined. Getting the fonts right for Hebrew seems to be more difficult than for Arabic. I spent a lot of time playing with that until choosing a size 20 font, which was a lot more legible. So Mlterm is the way to go for rtl. However I ran into problems. Mlterm seems less stable than Gnome Terminal, especially with console text editors. Every editor I have tried causes a terminal to crash at odd times, such as when scrolling to the bottom of the screen. So I’ve given up with all of them and gone back to Gui editors that are capable of writing in Hebrew. Gedit seems to be the most successful so far. I’ve yet to try Gvim or the gui version of Emacs

Things that I’ve learned this week

I’ve been spending some more time with plain text, the console and email programs

Email clients

Although I’ve embraced Mutt as an email client, in parallel I’ve also been in a fight to find a better system. I revisited Evolution and Thunderbird and tried Claws too. I thought that if I would use Evolution with OfflineImap, things could go better. But I had a great deal of difficulty with the Nametrans that is supposed to make that possible and in parallel, continuing problems with crashes on sending emails. And sometimes the program would refuse to shutdown properly. I abandoned it as unstable. With Thunderbird, my problem was that it would choke on my email store and become unusable for precious minutes, so I gave up on that too. In fairness, I did not give Claws enough time: there were some problems, again due to Imap. In order to use Claws with OfflineImap, I would need to set up a mail server, such as Dovecot. But I didn’t feel like playing around even more. I already had a mail client that works (Mutt) and decided I should stick with it.

In the beginning I found various obstacles to using Mutt. There’s something about looking at a console that (for a person that became used to a gui), generates panic. It’s like groping around in the dark. For instance, I found it difficult to attach files. And did not understand properly how to get my search results from Mairix (the search engine that can be used with Mutt). There are also so many things that can be configured with Mutt that this too took me a while. The temptation to just go back into online Gmail was and remains great. But slowly I’m getting used to Mutt and discovering its power. I can see how so many people get hooked.

Plain text editors

For my editor in Mutt, my options are somewhat limited since I also need to use Hebrew. There is one console that is supposed to work with right to left languages: mlterm. I haven’t studied it. Besides that I can use Gedit, Yudit or a KDE program like Kate. I’ve stuck with Gedit so far for my email editor.

But when I’m not writing email, I need only English. So there my options are wider. I can use practically any of the myriad text editors that exist on Linux. I prefer an editor that offers syntax highlighting for Markdown, but I haven’t settled on one single editor so far. I’ve tried Gedit, Scribes, Cream (a Gvim variant with more intuitive shortcuts), Joe, Pyroom and Retext.

Console

In all my 12 or 13 years with Linux I’ve probably never spent as much time in the console as in recent weeks. One of the things that I’ve learned to do in the last couple of days has been to learn to upload my console-powered static blog (under Blazeblogger), without going into Filezilla. I found a recipe for a simple LFTP script on the web. At first it didn’t work with my server. I didn’t understand why, but then found that I needed to add a line to LFTP’s configuration file (set ftp:ssl-allow no). Using this script takes another hurdle out of blogging with my static blog. It’s all about psychology, after all.

Working offline

There’s something about the internet that makes me want to restrict the time that I spend there, at least in the classical way of surfing the web and participating in social networking sites. So I’m devising a number of ways to avoid this. First of all, I’ve started not to visit Twitter.com, and to avoid entirely sites that only permit me to follow conversations when Online. I’d rather use a client like Gwibber, which allows me both to follow what’s being said on Twitter and Identi.ca while offline. I can also post my own status, of course, which somehow I feel more comfortable about doing when I’m offline. It may not so conventional but for me the future of social-networking involves being able to read all of my messages in one central location outside of a web browser, just like email.

Gwibber is not really an “offline” client, but only a desktop social networking client. However most of the articles I read on the web I discover first either in my RSS feeds or on Twitter. RSS does allow me to read many of those articles offline. I aggregate them under Opera. It makes them look like email, but recent changes in Opera have improved their appearance. The problem of course is that many sites do not provide a full rss stream but only a line or two from the article. Then I need to visit their web pages. There’s an additional problem that when I want to bookmark these sites, my method for doing that has been to use Pinboard. I use Pinboard not so much because I want to share these articles, but because I don’t so much like Opera’s bookmarking system. So I have to follow the link to the original site even though I have already read the article. Now I’m thinking that instead of visiting the original articles, I will flag or label them like email messages under Opera. It’s true that this will mean that some articles are flagged, and that others are shared on Pinboard; but anyway I subscribe to my own rss stream on Pinboard, so it doesn’t matter: they all end up in Opera’s email system.

I’ve also been playing with wget in order to download articles rather than visit their websites (a la Richard Stallman), but that’s just an experiment that I’m still thinking about.