In my last academic year (2006-2007), I took a course on aesthetics and politics at UofT, Marxism and Form (VIC401, based on the book of the same title by Fredric Jameson), taught by Eric Cazdyn. Taking the course was one of the more intelligent moves I made while at UofT. It was a graduate seminar and I had absolutely no idea what I was in for: it was probably only long after the full-year course had been completed, when I read Aesthetics & Politics cover-to-cover that I became relatively comfortable with the concepts discussed in the course.

Literature & Theory

I’d taken a course on English literature in the 20th century (ENG140). The emphasis of that course, as I recall (which I don’t recall well because I took it in the summer of 2004 while I was working full-time and taking another course on comparative politics) was not so much on the political or social implications of the texts (and we read some very good texts) as the moves within aesthetics, almost devoid of context — from romanticism to naturalism to … I don’t even remember. I do recall the professor’s analysis of the purple triangle in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a recurring motif, the significance of which flew over my head and probably still would (unless it was related to the politics of queer liberation, which, I can assure you, it wasn’t). I’m probably being unfair to the course, we did read In the Skin of a Lion, as well as Waiting for Godot, and I remember something about postmodernism being discussed (so maybe the course was moving through the major trends of literature?). Though, at the time, in the class I was taking on comparative politics, I learned about the concept of post-materialism which made a lot more sense to me. I should go back to my notes and see if I can actually give a fair and balanced account of the course content. Suffice it to say it bored me, very much.

My next experience with literature was a course on graphic novels (The ‘New Comics’, VIC300) with Luca Somigli. I enjoyed the content of the course, I’d already read most of the comics covered before starting the course anyway; and, judging from the mark I got on my final paper, Prof. Somigli enjoyed my paper very much. I wrote about Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde and his use of stereotypes to advance his political and moral agenda. Still, the discussions of literary theory and aesthetic theory, most of which I don’t recall anyway, probably went flying over my head. From these, and other experiences, I’d reckon that the most difficult thing in taking courses that are entirely outside of one’s academic purview is to acquire and maintain the vocabulary. By vocabulary, I don’t mean just the meanings of new words, but the significances and usages thereof. It took me, for instance, two whole years to wrap my head around the idea of postmodernism.

I suspect a lot of this had to do with the fact that I didn’t really think such terms and courses would be of much use to me — I was focusing on getting into medical school, not graduate school — and no one in life science or the kind of political science I was taking at UofT really cared about such things. That makes me wonder, as an aside, do Straussians bother to acknowledge postmodernism or think it worthy of being addressed? I don’t know of anyone like Harvey Mansfield — whose translations of The Prince and Discourses on Livy are superb — having written on Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Unmanly Liberal Academics.

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In Brecht’s Threepenny Novel, the character of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum observes:

Politicians can only take money because people picture their corruption as being altogether finer and nobler than it really is. Should anyone portray them as they are, that is, quite unscrupulous, then the whole world would cry out: What an unscrupulous rascal! and, by that, mean the portrayer.

It made me laugh.

And from one of Brecht’s unpublished drafts, writing in the 1950s about the 1990s to come:

The authorities had been able to cancel travel entirely since television now showed everything that interested delegations…. By means of raising productivity and volunteerism as well as by increasing efficiency, it was possible to limit the number of workers needed. At last, about 99% of the population could devote itself to the real goal of life, to the filling out of forms.

I have a bit of a propensity to avoid writing. It’s not that I dislike writing, I don’t; it’s more like I can’t be bothered to write out something once I’ve figured it out in my head. This explains how I approach essays and papers — once it’s in my head, that is to say, once I’ve assembled and arranged my research and my arguments, writing the actual essay is akin to moving a mountain. It also explains why I don’t blog much. If I really need to get something out, I might spill it out to an unsuspecting (and nonplussed) acquaintance — who perhaps writes off my momentary lapse of restraint to my eccentricity (or, weirdness), and as this occurrence replicates itself he may simply consider it to be the cost of engaging in otherwise mundane conversations with me (few, and happily, far between). When I can’t do that, I may end up typing whatever it is out, in a blog post. Other times — and this is perhaps most of the times I do write — I’m motivated by anger, frustration, or a pensive (or nostalgic) mood. Sometimes I may rant to a person and then refine that into a blog post.

I also don’t seem to find the time to indulge in fiction — that is to say, reading novels or watching many films (I do follow certain television shows regularly, though). The last novel I read was To Kill a Mockingbird out of some sense of obligation to my general schooling — though it was never on the curriculum. Until yesterday, the last film I can remember having actually sat down to watch was Spider-Man 3 — in the cinema — that is, not including documentaries. I’m no film critic or theorist — and to the extent that I’m interested in film criticism and theory, it’s for general aesthetic principles and not because of my love of the medium — there is no list of films sitting on my desktop waiting to be consummated. I read and watch far more non-fiction than I do fiction. Indeed, when recently asked if I read fiction, I responded, “Yes, I read the news.” This dearth of fiction doesn’t include comics, of course. I have almost an obsession with the medium, which means I read just about everything I can get my hands on, when I get the time to do so.

In the past few days I’ve been reading plays written by Bertolt Brecht (his plays are much easier to find than his poetry or his works on aesthetic theory) and have started on his novelization of his play, Threepenny Opera — the novel, aptly enough, is titled Threepenny Novel. Additionally, in the past two days I downloaded and watched several films, some of which I’ve been meaning to watch for a long time: Hitch, Hero, Thank You For Smoking, Art School Confidential, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Pursuit of Happyness.

Although all of these films, in their own ways, have something to say about love, life, politics and happiness, the last in particular — The Pursuit of Happyness — raised my ire most.

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Gulzar’s words:

Jungle jungle baat chali hai, pata chala hai
Arre, chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai, phool khila hai

Jungle jungle pata chala hai
Chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai
Jungle jungle pata chala hai
Chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai

Ek parinde hua sharminda, tha woh nanga!
Bhai, isse to ande ke andar, tha who changa!
Soonch raha hai bahar aakhir kyon nikla hai
Arre, chaddi pahan ke phool khila hai, phool khila hai

Jungle jungle pata chala hai
Chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai
Jungle jungle pata chala hai
Chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai

And mine:

Everywhere in the jungle word is spreading, it’s become known
Well, a shorts-wearing flower has blossomed, a flower’s blossomed

Everywhere in the jungle it’s become known
A shorts-wearing flower has blossomed
Everywhere in the jungle it’s become known
A shorts-wearing flower has blossomed

A bird became embarrassed — he was naked
Instead of this, inside his egg, he was just fine
Wondering why he he came out at all
Well, a shorts-wearing flower has blossomed

Everywhere in the jungle it’s become known
A shorts-wearing flower has blossomed
Everywhere in the jungle it’s become known
A shorts-wearing flower has blossomed

Needless to say the shortcomings are in my translation and not in the wonderful song that Gulzar wrote for this TV series. I first came across it in India in the early 90s, I don’t remember precisely when — I was far too young to be able to keep track. But there in front of a black and white television, my cousins gathered and eagerly watched this show. The theme song has seeped into the popular discourse of Hindi-speaking Indians, particularly the refrain, “Jungle jungle pata chala hai, chaddi pehan ke phool khila hai”, and the character of Mowgli. I don’t recall following the series, indeed, I couldn’t — there was no Doordarshan TV in Saudi Arabia, and when satellite channels came out, I don’t recall any of them carrying this show. But in any case, the refrain’s been in my head as well.

I read The Jungle Book in grade six. I enjoyed it, and it attests to Rudyard Kipling’s creativity (and perhaps his accessibility). I hadn’t really been exposed to Orientalism as a theoretical concept so I wasn’t quite thinking of that when I read the book. (Though my grade six teacher, Ms Pate, did try to introduce us to socially relevant literature — rights of African-Americans and the problems of clear-cutting and indigenous rights — and a lot of that probably made an impact on me.) Disney also produced an animated film based on the book. But The Jungle Book TV series was produced in Japan, primarily for a Japanese audience but, it seems, with an eye for export — and it was exported all around the world from what I can see on YouTube. There are dubbings in Finnish, German, English, Tagalog and, of course, Hindi. Thus, there’s a trajectory from British-occupied India to Kipling’s imagination to the Disney remake to the Japanese remake before coming back to India….

In 2000, I created a web site on Malcolm X, which has since become one of the major Malcolm X web sites on the Internet. It reflects a good deal on the ideology I adhered to and the way I approached things at that time, when I was 15 and completing grade 9 in Scarborough as a proto-Islamist. The site has remained stagnant, particularly ideologically — indeed, I put a disclaimer that the site is meant to present Malcolm within “an Islamic context” — although I’ve changed considerably, religiously and politically. It’s also remained stagnant in terms of content, the last substantive update being in 2005.

Academically, there was a surge of sustained interest in Malcolm X in the late 1980s and early 90s, in the midst of which Spike Lee produced the film in 1992. This interest reflected the growing relevance of Black nationalism as a response to the conditions of most Black people in the United States — Public Enemy was on point. Academics were commenting on Malcolm X leading up to and following the film. At some point in the 90s this interest seems to have tapered off. Another surge of interest surfaced in February 2005, around the fortieth anniversary of Malcolm’s assassination — commemorated by a special release of the Malcolm X DVD and mainstream media interest, but not (as far as I can tell) any substantial academic interest. That is, with the exception of Manning Marable at Columbia University who is now writing a biography of Malcolm.

I keep finding myself coming back to the question of Malcolm X, as well as the question of the web site. While I haven’t read anything relating to Malcolm substantially in a while, the myriad videos posted on the Internet have allowed me to instead watch him speak. Recently, I’ve bought several books containing his words and containing words about him. As I’ve developed politically and academically, however, the site has lagged behind.

Additionally, many people don’t know, exactly, what Malcolm X stood for (he himself had a hard time with that) or what his significance is to radical politics — he’s been reduced to a symbol and a phrase, “by any means necessary”.

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There’s a used bookstore way up the street. I find myself dropping by from time to time to see what they have — the first time I went I was interested only in the comics. Later, I went looking for other kinds of books, academic books. They used to have a whole set of writings of Marx and Engels from Progress Publishers that weren’t there when I visited yesterday. I also found a huge book, Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings — the second edition from 1979. I looked into the most recent editions, and they are, for the most part, the same, with a few essays added here and there. I also found Rius’s Marx for Beginners. (“To Craig, A little light but politically correct humour. Happy Birthday! David. Summer, 1987.” I didn’t really find the book funny.)

There’s a shelf full of ‘classics’ of literature — Penguin Classics and the like. I saw a couple of copies of Albert Camus’s The Outsider, and I considered buying one. The problem, of course, was that it was a translation from the French. And I was supposed to have read the French in grade 12. Mme Liscio had wanted us to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos as an introduction to existentialism and Camus’s L’Etranger as an introduction to the philosophy of the absurd. I read the former, but barely read the latter, relying instead on free online study notes — which, needless to say, were a very poor substitute. After I graduated from high school I made little effort to keep what French I had learned fresh. I did, at one point, sign out a French comic book from Robarts — Stigmates — in a failed attempt to improve what little French I had rattling around in my mind.

In the summer of 2006, as Israel executed its war on Lebanon, I realized just how much was written on the subject in French — obviously, a lot to do with Lebanon’s colonial past. But it was when I came back to Sartre — reading Search for a Method for my Marxism & Form class — that I began to regret more deeply my lack of advanced French reading skills. Then I watched The Battle of Algiers — and I could not, for the life of me, keep up with the spoken French and I had to rely on English subtitles. Then came readings of Rancière, Badiou, as well as rumblings of Althusser, Balibar, so on, and that increased the desire to be able to access them in French. Not to mention Frantz Fanon. It’s like regretting not having learned German so as to be able to read Marx, Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, and others in their original language — only I did know French. And still do, to some extent.

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