Daily Oddities, July 23rd, 2009

We’ve got lots to talk about today, so lets get right down to the real serious stuff.

Globe: Things still really suck for EU little cousins Bulgaria and Romania, where infighting, corruption and graft are making it difficult to get anything done. Vote-buying, which we’ve mentioned before, is easy when your political power is less valuable (and less real) than a few kilos of sugar. Someone finally explains the decriminalization of homosexuality in India, which was confusing us, and scientists learn that chimps really had AIDS all along.  Chief Rabbis have threatened to un-kosher certain veggies for overspraying, and the first trials of a new swineflu vaccine are underway in the land down under!

California: As we repored earlier, it’s going to be a hot motherfucker in the Southland this weekend. Which apparently won’t stop people from lining up around the corner for social services from the Mexican Consulate (brought to you by the department of obvious feature stories).

If you want social services in Brooklyn: Brokelyn’s got a special report on all the places you can recieve medical care if you haven’t got a pesky little thing called insurance. Which could come in handy if you happen to run into one of the CRAZY RABID RACOONS terrorizing the boroughs or if you happen to be part of the half of New York City that is overweight.

Bibliomaniac’s Guide to Reading

Some days, it seems like reading is a lost art. Sure, we read text messages and Tweets and even Japanese cell phone novels; we read on the iPhone and the Kindle and maybe even the headlines at NYTimes.com, but when was the last time you sat down with a serious work of literary fiction or long-form journalism and actually finished it? Whose was the last biography you read? The last book of essays? The last contender for Great American Novel?

The sad fact is, in the first quarter of 2009, one out of every seven books sold in the United States was by Stephanie Meyer, of Twilight fame.  The very existence of Dan Brown in the cannon should be enough to make writers, would be writers, and lit nerds alike throw down their swords and give up the fight. I’m not against popular literature–far from it–but wasn’t there a time in the not so distant past where we made a distinction between pop and pulp, where writers like Mark Twain,  Judy Blume and Kurt Vonnegut wrote blockbuster bestsellers that didn’t suck (and that’s just the Americans). Sure, good writers are still out there ( and G-d willing, always will be) but their market is ever-shrinking. The reason? Readers have forgotten how to read.

Sure, the internet has a hand in it, but so does the proliferation of the automobile, the explosion of television, the sub-/exurb and the increasing demands of modern life. Now that you’re un- (or under) employed (or, conversely, now that you’re maximally stressed trying to scrimp around the edges and make ends meet in a fantastically bad economy), here’s 7 tips to help you relearn reading.

1) Break it up: The number one reason non-readers don’t read is that reading is boring. Yes, I admit it, even I get bored with books. That’s why I read across platforms (to borrow terminology). A typical month includes daily internet news, two weekly magazines, one or two novels, a collection of short stories or essays and a biography or non-fiction book. That’s a lot, but even beginners can mix and match to match their ability, taste and appetite. For more clues on how to do it, keep reading…

Sergei Dovlatov, and why you should care

It’s been a little while since I felt the compulsive need to write/talk/read about Sergei Dovlatov, the unsung Soviet storyteller whose raw wit and uncomfortable humor trancends national borders, economic philosophies, and continents, even if it never trancended Russian. He is also my favorite author, and the subject of this week’s New Yorker Fiction Podcast.

Dovlatov was at once the ultimate starving artist and the ultimate sell-out hack. He was as reluctant a Soviet as he was an American, and yet he excelled at both. Though he died of liver cirrosis (which, if you’ve read any of his fiction, is painfully ironic) at 48, he was exceptionally prolific. Yet, much deserved notoriety has evaded him, in death as in life. Perhaps because he died at precisely the same historical moment as the Soviet Union, a period in which our interest in our great Cold War nemisis suddenly evaporated into thin air.  Perhaps it’s because so little of his work is translated, although that’s a rather specious arguement. In any case, Dovlatov is one of only a few writers you’re more likely to find at your local library than at your local bookstore. Go check him out. Vidoes are in Russian.

Dovlatov on being a writer:

OMFG I LOVE YOU BARNEY FRANK <3 <3 <3

Rep Barney Frank is the hottest pool volleyball playing mother fucker on Earth

Be the AWESOME you wish to see in the world, Barney. BE IT.

Terror Couture

Recently, I’ve become obsessed by terrorist chic- not the kind defined so brilliantly by bradtriescriticaltheory – the sort that’s already been coopted and comodified to the point that Palestinians should be embarassed to wear the kaffieyeh, but things you could only hope to buy abroad or in the untouched pockets of outer borogh New York. After all, isn’t that what drives fashion? Having stuff others can’t? Terror chic are things I would wear if i lived in nihilist, party-obsessed Berlin, where no one gives a fuck about being PC and my friend Anna walks around in a fox stole and suspenders over a wifebeater. Granted, I’ve never been there, but if i were i think this is what i would don.

La Santa Muerte medal:

Two years from now, this will be on Vice Mag’s DOs/DON’Ts list. Today, I could only begin to start to tell you where you get it. Santa Muerte is the sculled and hooded figure of death, the patroness of narcotraficantes. Wear it on a gold chain, either over your cleavage creasing text-tat or in that bear-patch you’ve so artfully groomed to  sweat in full public view  over the collar of your V-neck 50-50 tee.

Sri Lanka vs Darfur: How We Read Conflict

*(reader note: since lots of my recent traffic seems to have an infants sense of irony, I’m marking anything I said ironic  with asterisks. ****)

I was asked in an interview recently why the Sri Lankan conflict (which has about 1/2 the deaths + 1/3 of the refugees of the Darfur crisis – 95% of the international attention) doesn’t get more press. Upon realizing that I knew the answer and could articulate it, I felt at once elated, depressed and fucking nerdy. I also felt a deep and abiding need to share.

1) Sri Lanka has precisely  * zero * strategic interest for anyone, ever (except India).
The island, though rich in culture, history, and foliage, lacks the natural resources of a place like, say Burma. As an island it borders nothing, and so threatens little. The only people Sri Lanka ever menaces are Indians, though they do that to great effect, since at least the time of the Ramayan, when the demon Ravaana came up out of its jungles to wreck Bible-style havoc. The Tamil refugee crisis has sparked civil unrest in India’s southernmost state, where the entire parlament resigned late last year to protest Delhi’s not doing of things. Then again, Tamil Tigers killed Rajiv Gandhi, so maybe it was, like, a thing. On the third hand, India’s protracted elections will probably reflect, at least in part, Tamil Nadu’s increasing distress at Delhi’s cold shoulder.

Check Out my Awesome Slideshow

I am consistantly amazed at how much i get to do whatever i want.

the things i like to write about (are weird)

From time to time, when I am writing, I have this thought—which I occasionally post on FB:

“sometimes i sit down and i write some shit and i think, holy mother of G-d i am a sick, terrible person. at least i’m thin”

Usually in those exact words . Anyone who knows me knows that i write a lot (despite not having posted here in about a week—srry!), both for a living/school and in my free time. It’s like that quote from Karn’s piece about cigarette smoking in NYC—”I won’t be able to quit. It comes from inside me”

I’ve gotta tell you, the shit i write for work is bad enough (Tamil Tigers, stabbings, rape/murder and a measles epidemic, and that’s just this week), but in spite of or because of this, the shit i write after work is even worse. Sometimes I read through what I’ve written for the night and then i think, motherfucker, i need some valium or a quarter of a xanax or something. Because of course I’m really not writing about these things—I’m writing about a doomed love affair and a laundromat chain and some IED taxi cabs—and yet they come out of me. Which is why if the Kindle ever generates a tag-cloud for fiction, I’ll have to throw myself from the Verrazano Bridge.

Observe

A history of the conflict in Sri Lanka, from Guardian.co.uk

Chronicle of conflict

• Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948. The country has a population of 21 million, of whom about 3.2 million are of Hindu Tamil origin.

• Tamil is one of the principal languages of the Hindu Dravidian dialect, with more than 200 million speakers across India.

• Ceylon Tamils are ethnic Sri Lankans and constitute approximately half of the Tamil population in Sri Lanka. They are concentrated in the north of the island, are relatively well educated, and many hold clerical and professional positions.

• Other Tamils, so-called Indian Tamils of Sri Lanka, were brought there by the British in the 19th and 20th centuries from southern India to work on the tea estates.

• Though both predominantly Hindu, Ceylon and Indian Tamil are organised under different caste systems and have little to do with each other.

• In the 1970s, growing tensions between the Hindu Ceylon Tamils and successive Sinhalese Buddhist majority governments broke out into a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the central government by Tamil militants demanding a separate state in the north-east.

• The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s conflict with the government has killed an estimated 70,000 people since it began, and left thousands more displaced.

• Violence increased in 2005 after President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s election campaign, when he ruled out autonomy for Tamils in the north and east and promised to review the peace process.

• Both the military and the Tigers have been regularly accused of gross abuses of human rights by organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Little Big Things in South Asia part 2—Tata’s Nano and what the 1W is missing

THE NANO IS HERE!

Back in the day when I used to read Adbusters, I remember they had a video that depicted the United States as a pig trying to squirm its way out of the map. It was supposed to represent how North America uses 25% of the world’s resources despite having only 4% of the world’s population. That was in, like, 1998. A decade later, i thought the message would have gotten so old it’d be a disgusting cliche, but NO. Euro-American selfishness REFUSES TO DIE.

My beef isn’t with consumption—that’s the oldest saw on the planet. My beef is with ENVIRONMENTALISTS, the selfish, narcissistic, whiny, self-righteous ass-clowns who have the NERVE to bitch about the Tata Nano, the most eagerly awaited consumer product to hit India since Nokia.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS fear that the explosive popularity of the Nano (which middle class Indians have been saving for months to buy) will increase the demand for fossil fuels and drive up air pollution. They blame Tata for not making the “world’s cheapest car” ™  a clean energy vehicle. If you think that’s absurd, its because it is absurd. And/or you don’t yet understand that the laws that apply to Western environmentalists and those that apply to middle class Delhites, Mumbaikars, Hyderbadies, Kolkatans and Bangalories are totally different.

Obvs.

There is a valid environmental concern. Namely, that a bunch of people who used to drive pollution spewing motorbikes will now start driving gas guzzling cars. And they won’t do it a few hundred thousand at a time—Indians are going to switch by the tens of millions. If it could have produced a cheap clean energy vehicle for the Indian middle class, it would have been a boon for the earth.

The question is—why does that responsibility fall on Tata’s shoulders? Why does every article about the Nano in the mainstream western press play lip service to the idea that this is fair when it’s ridiculous? Have you ever even been on the Delhi Metro? It’s like being crushed to death. Ride the Mumbai Local much? Even a crosstown trip in an auto-rickshaw (surely more polluting than the new Nano) is enough to make you want to wash your hair.