Update

Okaaay: It's been pointed out that i misrepresented myself in the post below.

The allegation being that i'm actually pretty oblivious and have failed in the past to recognize close family members, good friends etc. on the street even when they were yelling my name and waving at me.

And in addition, i once walked through two museum rooms holding the hand of some surprised, unknown guy, because i 'd blindly reached for and grabbed what i believed was the hand of my younger cousin, but was actually the hand of above specified guy. Mea Culpa.

[And sotto voce: i did say i notice good-looking people. :)]

Let the record show that my point re. not making said good lookers uncomfortable, stands.

Shooting Street Harassers (with your camera)

Walking down the street, I’m alive, awake. I'll look at people, notice what they’re wearing, notice if it looks good on them.

[Haley Joel Osmet voice]

I see good-looking people.

All the time.

However, I’ve never invaded their personal space to make the grope, eye-attack, comment/compliment/invite, etc. Anyone’s who’s endured any of the above knows that it’s the feeling of being powerless and victimized that’s the worst part. September’s Ms. Magazine counsels via Hollaback NYC to:

take a photo when men hassle or insult in public... and to make the photo public on www.hollabacknyc.com.

The worst of these photos end up in the "Holla Shame." Interestingly, Holla Back [sic] is collaborating with Blank Noise Project, India. What is the Blank Noise Project about? Well most recently, this:

For some months now the Blank Noise Project team…has
been working on the clothes campaign.... looking to collect a minimum of
1,000 clothes that women were wearing when they were sexually harassed and
string these together in an installation at a public site and will
eventually travel across many cities. The variety of the clothes we're
getting (salwar kameezes to tank tops) defies the notion that by wearing a
particular kind of clothing, a woman "asks for it".

There are bound to be some philosophical reservations such as aren't Holla Back NYC and the other Holla Back chapters promoting a kind of laissez faire vigilantism… what will the Blank Noise Project do if someone sends them an item of offensive clothing--will that particular woman then be deemed as having asked for it… what are the possibilities of redress and reparation if wrongly represented on either site, etc.

But for now, they constitute an energetic, and overdue, step forwards.

FACTS

The sun rises impudently

His sky-blue skin

Presses against windows

Poignant with sin;

Curtains grow pregnant

In the wind

THER: Chapter 1

The plane inches its way along like a deliberate needle in someone’s sluggish bloodstream. With eyes shut in the darkness, Neeru thinks of the relief with which she will hand over the two navy blue passports--the Indian one hers, the American one her son’s--to the official at the Chennai airport. A moment of homecoming.

Actually the last time she had done that, the man at the counter had insisted that Amul’s passport was invalid because it wasn’t signed—and Amul had been just nine months old then. She wondered whether the man expected her to pay him something, decided not, and faked meek and stupid to explain to the man, “Look, he’s just a baby, he doesn’t write--or read--yet.” Mahesh had been with her that time and had first looked at her with unbelieving horror before trying to look away and control his laughter.

“You should have signed it before,” the passport official growled, slicing the space in front of her neck with the baby’s passport.
“I’ll sign it now,” she offered meekly.
“You should have signed it before” he maintained.
Ultimately convinced by the restlessness of the crowd behind her, he reluctantly returned the passport for her to sign and waved her through with a smug and stately wave. You may have traveled abroad but I know more about traveling he might have said.

But this time the passport was signed, and hadn’t yet been handed over to the airport man. Amul was sleeping soundly though still assiduously kicking away her efforts to cover him up from the chilled airplane air. She looked at him and brushed his hair back with a firm stroke well into his hairline—he always plumbed deeper into sleep sometimes smiling or whimpering in delight when she did that.

In her sleep, sometimes when he woke her up with an urgent “Ammu”, she would wonder who and where the baby who wanted his mother was. Then she would remember, she was the Ammu, the baby hers. “I need to be dressed” she thought, “in a sari.” That’s what mothers wore. She remembered seeing an Indian woman, young—twentyish with a five-year-old son on a bus in Oxford. The woman wore a lightly colored, floaty sari over a contrasting short blouse and wore kumkum on her forehead and in her part. There was no other color on her face and she was beautiful enough not to need any. She talked to her son casually, not overly interested like the other mums, and didn’t make eye contact though Neeru tried very hard. Neeru somehow felt that when she was a mother she would wear some kind of floaty beautiful sari and wipe away her baby’s tears with the soft end of the pallu that would softly smell of healthy vegetarian food.

Neeru goes to sleep easily and eagerly hoping to look fresh and carefree to her parents at the airport. But when she wakes up her eyes are puffy. “Can you watch him?” she asks of the stewardess; she says “him” on a soft elevation wanting the stewardess to know he was lovely, fun, and special though he was sleeping and therefore also easy to watch.

She splashes airline water in her eyes. It seems static not flowing through miles of pipes or rivers but merely an overhead tank. She practices a smile: Pleased, dazzling, thrilled to be here. Creases her eyes as she thinks ahead to hugging deliriously.

“I’m not tired!’”
“Amul slept a lot.”
“Oh Mahesh is fine.”
"His job is going well.”
“He’s so busy you know.”
She practices.

She practices also, “Thank you for watching him” and delivers it neatly to the stewardess. Somehow, it's important that the stewardess thinks that she and her son are lovely and no trouble at all, deserving of all the kindnesses that airplane staff perform for parents with young children.

Amul burrows his sleepy two-year-old body closer to her and she wakes him up, “Hey, wanna cuddle?”

“Kull!” he assents, and opens alert eyes waiting for her to pass her hands over him and say “hey, you know I love you from the top of your head to your spiky hair, down these kissy cheeks, this stomping heart, this empty tummy, this bumpy bottom, these knobby knees, these funny ankles... all the way to the bottom of your feet.”

So she does, and then they read his Caillou book and the brown bear book and she brings out three novelties (twelve linking monkeys, a magic drawing board, and a set of inch high construction trucks). She bought all these treats at the dollar store stashed them away for their ability to distract. She brings them out one by one from a huge backpack.

Soon enough the plane lands: all the patchwork colors grow into recognizable objects, the insecticide sprayed in a magic mist before the doors are levered open. The presenting of the passports passes quickly and unmemorably because there is no anecdote-worthy hitch. There are in the big arrival hall now. She looks just a little bit fragile in the huge backpack filled mostly with Amul’s comforter. And she has practiced for the moment well. Amul is wearing long trousers despite the Chennai heat so he looks adorably grown up. They have practiced recognizing photos of his grandparents for months. So when her parents, the eager grandparents, are allowed to bypass security, Amul performs. "Thatha," he yells pointing and "Ammama." And he politely allows himself to be kissed and then squeezed and pinched and hugged.

“Like an arrow, my boy,” says her father. He means Amul has an unerring aim, is straight as an arrow in his recognition of his grandparents. He has just the two daughters and Neeru and her sister Nischu have wondered if the parents wanted boys after all.

“Like an arrow he came straight to me.”

Amul is enjoying all the attention and praise and loving and Neeru finds a moment to say her piece unasked:
“I’m not tired!’”
“Amul slept a lot.”
“Oh, Mahesh is fine.”
“His job is going well.”
“He’s so busy you know.”


Her parents are so happy to see her. Touching her face, her arm constantly. Asking questions to the answers she has given them already.
“Are you tired Kanna?
How did you travel all alone with Amul?
Will He join you later?

Bad Professor: James Kincaid misunderstands cultural theory, the JonBenet Phenom, and most of us.

James R. Kincaid, an English prof. at USC, has been writing in The Slate, and practically everywhere else, about how we are given to automatically labeling as child porn anything that’s a turn on.

The Slate article, titled “Little Miss Sunshine” in an opportunistic of-the-moment pop culture reference, has this to say about the return of the JonBenet case to the media:

It probably shouldn't surprise us that JonBenet, like Roderick Usher's sister, won't stay buried. It's the return of the repressed all over again, here before us, strutting its stuff and doing its cultural work because we so badly need it. Where else can we find forbidden material served up to us in ways we can both enjoy and disown? We have to deal with a most uncomfortable heritage: an "innocent" child who is also deeply eroticized…Somebody else finds the bodies of children irresistible and we want the chance to rail against these monsters, meanwhile relishing the details of the very bodies we claim indifference to. It is a classic example of scapegoating.

Kincaid’s deconstructionist double bluff is that anyone who takes an interest in the Jon Benet case is guilty of the exact same eroticisation of children that the media accuses her killer/s of perpetrating.

Ummm, really?
My mistake, I would have thought that the furor was because we care about the welfare of children.

The ta-da nature of Kincaid’s collapsing of binaries is pure sleight of hand and hence essentially false; the world is not always binaries fused at the node and there are more realities than Kincaid cares to acknowledge. In trying to insist that if we are horrified by child predators, we are in fact horrified by our inner demons, Kincaid attempts to gag us with projected uncertainties that are not our own.

(The if-you-are-disturbed-by-it-you-must-desire-it diagnosis has its limitations. I’ve used the if-you’re-so-homophobic-you-must-be-totally-gay line too, but tell you what, it only works flawlessly as speculative insult, never as serious philosophy or analysis.)

While the schadenfreude that Kincaid implies is rampant in a variety of scandalous situations, recently and most transparently in the Kaavya Vishwanathan case, when it comes to child abuse, I’ve never been able to detect schadenfreude in either tonal nuance or attitudinal stance. I refuse to believe that public alarm at child sexual abuse is because we are titillated by it, it’s because the majority of us are aware of the danger of it, because we seek to prevent it.

My long-standing distaste for children in pageants, or cabaret-style dance routines for that matter, is mostly aesthetic--the garishness of wedgie-inducing costumes, the unsubtlety of the performing-monkey make up, the manneristic ugliness of stage mothers, the hideousness of getting children to compete on grounds of attractiveness… But my distaste is increasingly ethical too. The human body is beautiful and lovable; parading underdressed and overly made up children is doing them a disservice, an indignity, and in our times, a treachery. So, I’m coming off as a prude, but whatever.

Perhaps I’m still recovering from reading the following gem from Kincaid who presumes to speak for all of us:

Tell ourselves the truth: in our culture kids and the erotic are overlapping categories and we cannot help but find kids erotic, which is not so bad, considering that we find lots of things erotic without attacking them. Most of us do not, for example, hump the legs of guests at parties.

Never mind, for the moment, that after previously arguing that society’s stance towards those who view children as sexual objects of desire be softened, Kincaid practically admits that it is social etiquette alone that precludes everyone from humping or having their legs humped at parties…

He said, “we cannot help but find kids erotic.”

Stand back, everyone.

Kincaid isn’t talking of the allure of young women or even unsuitably young women--think Brittney Spears on debut--we live in a mostly patriarchal society, I‘d get that. He’s talking about children--JonBenet, Shirley Temple--who look like children.

I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse Kincaid of being a pedophile as Lee Seigel does in The New Republic, but Kincaid, clearly, is screwing theory. Screw him.

Lisa Lerner: Sweet Child O' Mine*

There's an unsettling essay by Lisa Lerner on Alternet about her dismay on realizing that the little girl she'd adopted from India was darker than “even Blacks and Indians” whom she knew. But really, the only thing offensive about the essay is its outrageous, and misleading, title: A Mother Adopts, and Discovers Her Own Racism.

To me, Lerner’s love for Vaishali, her child, is evident in her detailed scrutiny of her feelings and her courage in airing those politically uncomfortable feelings publicly. I strongly believe that she is/was upset for her child, her child’s prospects and acceptance in the world, rather than upset about the child herself. That is, her involvement with racism is not that she is invested in it but rather that she is aware of it, fears it, and is afraid of the implications of racism for her child.

Nevertheless, it’s more than a little odd for a child--infant really--to have to jump through the hoops of racial aspect--fullness of lips, straightness of hair, etc. Children are typically above and beyond the boundaries of race; they fly under the race radar. That's how they're frequently able to insinuate social reform in a Trojan horse kinda way--I’m thinking here both of strategic movements such as the school integration of the 1960s, as well as the fortuitous ways in which class and race are backgrounded when children socialize at school.

True, Li’l A likes to shoot me a sly, sidelong glance and reproach me for being overly fond of “all baby things;” I must admit also that that my own unhyphenated, doted-on childhood existence makes me experientially ill-equipped to comment on the challenge that childhood is to many. Still, at core, I’m convinced that in those of us unscathed by extreme insanity or crippling scarcity, children awaken impulses of love, good faith, and endeavor.

As for Lerner, perhaps I should lend her my dad for a few days. If I ever heard something about how it was a pity I was so dark-skinned, he always had plenty to say about how the goddesses and gods famed for their beauty--Parvati, Lakshmi, Krishna, Balaji--were dark, how south-Indian temple idols are always carved of black granite, how dark skin makes facial features more beautiful...

Happy Birthday Dad : )!
____________________________________________________________
* McSweeney’s TFF! snark attack on the Axl Rose track lies here.

Finally, Axl, I think we might have had a misunderstanding regarding my previous notes. When I wrote in colored pencil "Where do we go now?" I wasn't offering that as a lyric. I was simply observing that, in narrative terms, the song needed to progress in some way. You love the girl, she's helping you work through some issues, whatever. So where do we go now? But instead of providing a satisfactory conclusion, you simply took my note and repeated it over and over again before ultimately just stating the title of the song. This is unacceptable. Don't ask us, the listeners, where we go. That's up to you as the writer! Tell us where we go now!

_______________________________________________________________
Also--and apropos of mostly naught--really, let the record show that i don't find "irony" an interesting substitute for intelligence or beauty or talent anymore.

(from my journal) I wish I could get paid for:

Writing poetry
Playing with kids
Cuddling
Accepting compliments
Designing rooms
Snuggling
Making goofy puns
Reading aloud
Yoga
Running in the park for exactly as long as I want
Chocolate tasting
Feeding ducks
Feeding anyone
Dancing
Jumping
Picking books out for people
Reading anything I want
Kissing
Making out
Having crushes
Tending plants
Skinny dipping
Shopping
Getting presents
Jumping in raked leaves
Watching remembered movies
Lying in the dark and looking at the sky
Learning to bake
Being painted from head to toe
Getting massages
Laughing my head off
Tossing my hair
Past good behavior, grades
Knowing my LOTR (and Star Wars)
Listening to music
Being wiling to listen to any kind of music

And you wouldn't even have to pay me *that* much...