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Charity

My wife and I have a seven-hundred square foot apartment in which, among other things, we have more books than a reasonably stocked independent bookstore. We’ve also got about all of the computer and audio-visual equipment that we can use (and some we still haven’t used). At this point, we can’t bring anything into our apartment without first removing something else. For the last couple of years, we’ve been trying to convince anyone who might be inclined to do so not to give us tangible gifts of any kind, and we’ve pretty much stopped giving each other gifts.

For our anniversary this past summer, in lieu of a gift, I made a donation in my wife’s name through Donors Choose. The donation was to buy books, journals, and markers for a second grade class at P.S. 11 to keep journals during this school year. Since my wife was herself a dedicated journal writer as a child not far from there, I thought that would be fitting. She was touched at the time, and then we pretty much forgot about it.

When I got home from work last night, I found my wife sitting on the couch in tears, holding a pile of papers. The papers were thank you notes from all of the students in that class at P.S. 11, each personal and all ardent in their declarations of their love for my wife. One even declared that this would allow her to be an author. Seeing this, I was struck by two things.

First and foremost, I was deeply moved. Seeing such genuine appreciation from these kids that someone actually cared about them, it was impossible not to be. And I think that response is a result of the best aspect of Donors Choose’s approach, which is to allow the teachers themselves to define the projects to be funded as opposed to having the projects defined by funders, who likely have no idea of what’s actually needed, meaning that their efforts are more likely to be informed by guilt and ideology than anything else. In Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux makes a compelling case that such a dynamic has led to charity and other aid efforts in Africa actually making conditions there worse.

But it also occurred to me that most elementary school students in this country don’t have to write thank you notes for their school supplies, and that’s probably the way it should be. That some do is why I found this so depressing yesterday. And I think this gets at something about Donors Choose’s approach that makes me a little uncomfortable, which is that the projects that the teachers define then have to compete against each other for donations, with these notes from deprived innocents as the enticement. I have this image in my mind of a geography teacher not being able to get new maps and globes for her class because its not an alluring enough project to potential donors.

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Be the Rigden

Since the inception of the medium, there have been a couple of very good Buddhist podcasts (the Infinite Smile podcast and the Zencast podcast), both of which are Zen-influenced and originate from the San Francisco Bay area, and I’ve been a regular listener to both since the beginning. Recently, Ethan Nichtern, a member of the Shambhala community in which I study and practice and also a teacher on his own, has begun offering the 21st Century Buddhism podcast, which is based in Tibetan Buddhism and originates from here in New York. It’s a valuable contribution to the the digital proliferation of this ancient tradition.

I’ve now heard a few different approaches to the introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, and I think Ethan’s is the most effective. From its first episode, his podcast starts from the beginning and proceeds clearly and steadily. He’s an excellent teacher. He manages to be true to the tradition in which he’s based while making the teachings accessible to those who have no background in that tradition. If you’re curious about Tibetan Buddhism, his podcast is a great place to start.

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Pumpkin Aid?

When I woke this morning, the phrase “Pumpkin Aid” (or the word “Pumpkinade”) was echoing in my head (much like the random phrases that Lionel on As Time Goes By sometimes speaks when he awakes). What could that mean? Had I been dreaming of some truly vile beverage, or was I imagining some sort of event to benefit all those pumpkins that this morning find themselves out of favor until they can be made into pies for Thanksgiving?

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Something’s Really Wrong in the East

It‘s not safe for work and I have no idea what they’re saying, but the production values are impressive, you can dance to it, and a Buddha makes an appearance, so it can’t be all bad, can it?

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Indians are the Jews of East Africa

In Dark Star Safari, his extraordinary account of a trip he made by boat, bus, and train from Cairo to Cape Town, Paul Theroux returns to Malawi, a country in which he served in the Peace Corps in the 1960s. He finds the country, as he finds much of the eastern portion of Africa through which he travels, ill used by the passing decades. Throughout the course of the book, he develops a compelling condemnation of the developed nations’ treatment of Africa, which I won’t try to describe here. But in the portion of the book describing his travels in Malawi, he sketches the outlines of an odd theme: the persecution of the Indian immigrants to east Africa. He first touches on this theme when he travels through Karonga, the town he enters after crossing the border from Tanzania.

Indians had been officially hectored in the sixties. The first president, Hastings Banda, had come to Karonga in 1965 and singled them out, berated them, accusing Indian traders of taking advantage of Africans. “Africans should be running these businesses,” he howled. But many of the Indians stayed. In the 1970s the president returned to Karonga and denounced the Indians again. This time the Indians got the message: nearly all left, and those few that hesitated saw their shops burned down by Banda’s Israeli-trained Young Pioneers. Eventually, the remaining Indians either left Karonga for cities in the south or emigrated. Banda had gone to other rural towns and given the same speech, provoking the same result.

The shock to me was not that all the Indians were gone but that no one had come to take their place; that the shops were in ruins, still with the names of Ismailis and Gujaratis on them…

Reading that, I thought vaguely, “Kristallnacht…”

Later, after a thoroughly disheartening visit to the school at which he had taught, Theroux visits a friend from those days in Zomba. At a dinner party at that friend’s house, Theroux is asked about what he has seen during his visit by a former Malawi ambassador in Europe. He returns to the theme of the immigrant Indians and mentions the pointlessness of the abandoned shops in Karonga. The ambassador attempts to excuse the situation.

“We wanted Africans to be given a chance to run the shops. So that Africans could go into business. The shops were handed over. I bought one myself.”

“With what result?”

“Ha-ha! Not much! It didn’t work. They all got finished!”…

“Well, as you know, Indians are good at business,” he said. Then, laughing in dismay as if he had just dropped a slice of bread butter-side down, “What do we know about these things? We had no capital. The shops failed–almost all of them. Ha! They were abandoned, as you saw. And the rest were turned into chibuku bars.” Beer bars…

“[The Indians] sit there, you see, and they have these little pieces of paper, and have these columns of numbers.” He spoke pompously about the Indians as though describing demented obsessive children with broken toys. “And one Indian is running the calculator, and another is counting the sacks of flour and the tins of condensed milk. One two three. One two three.”…

I said, “But that’s how a shop is run. That’s normal business. You make a list of what you’ve sold, so you know what stuff to reorder.”

“Indians know no other life!” he said. “Just this rather secluded life–all numbers and money and goods on shelves. One two three.”

“Recordkeeping is the nature of small business, isn’t it?” I resented his belittling the shopkeeper, yet I kept calm so as to draw him out. “The profit margins are so small.”

“But we Africans are not raised in this way,” he said, nodding to the others for approval. “What do we care about shops and counting? We have a much freer existence. We have no interest in this–shops are not our strong point.”

“Why close the shops, then?”

Here I found myself thinking of The Merchant of Venice…

Later still in his southward progress through Malawi, Theroux travelled in a dugout canoe down the Shire River to the Zambezi River and Mozambique with two native guides, Karsten and Wilson, and the theme of the immigrant Indians in east Africa makes its final, most uncanny return.

I caught a few words of a story that Karsten was telling Wilson–“Indian” and “fish” and “money”–and as we paddled across the Zambezi, our dugout pulled sideways by the power of the stream, he told me the story.

Farther up the Zambezi, on the Zambian side, he said, lived Indian traders who made a practice of abducting very young African girls from villages. The Indians killed the girls and cut out their hearts. Using the fresh hearts of these African virgins as bait on large hooks, they were able to catch certain Zambezi fish that were stuffed full of diamonds.

“That is why the Indians have so much money,” Karsten said.

And so finally, we have tales reminiscent of anti-Semitic blood libel myths…

Though Theroux clearly lays out the ways in which the persecution of Indians in east Africa parallels the persecution of Jews in Europe, he never actually mentions it (unless the ironic detail that Banda’s Young Pioneers were trained in Israel is meant to be a hint). I find that puzzling. It seems impossible that he wouldn’t have recognized the parallel. Did he perhaps think it too obvious to warrant mentioning? But regardless of Theroux’s purposes, I find it surprising that the same idiosyncratic collection of slurs and calumnies directed at Jews in Europe were elsewhere attached to another ethnic group. Is there some universal subconscious cultural association between commerce and child sacrifice, and if so, why? Are still other ethnic groups thought of in this same way in other cultures?

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Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcasts

Meg asks:

Is there some sort of memo that goes around telling everyone else who the cool indie/alt/edgy bands are? Why am I not on the mailing list?

Since I can’t seem to post a comment on her Weblog at the moment, I thought I’d answer her question here. I don’t know about a memo, but there are a couple of podcasts that do just that, and you can subscribe to them in iTunes or any of a number of other podcasting clients. There’s the CBC Radio 3 podcast, based on which I’ve puchased at least a half dozen albums in the last couple of months, and, of course, there’s the Radio Clash podcast.

And speaking of podcasts, I was listening to the latest episode of the BBC World Service Documentary Archive podcast, a return to Sarajevo ten years after the siege of the city, on the subway on the way to work this morning, and it was all I could do not to cry. On a couple of occasions, I’ve stood on the subway laughing at something that only I can hear on my iPod, and that probably looks strange enough, but crying at something that only I can hear might be a little too strange. Or maybe no one would notice.

Four earlier episodes of that same podcast, “The Soul Within Islam,” chronicled a British Muslim’s travels around the fringes of the Muslim world (to Malaysia, Morocco, Turkey, and so on) in search of clues to the future of Islam. It’s a fascinating piece of reporting, but I find it very amusing that in his travels in search of the soul of Islam, he manages to find and interview not one but two Islamic supermodels in two different countries who’ve since given up modelling and now wear the veil. After speaking to the first one in Malaysia, did he really need to speak to the other in Turkey to flesh out the supermodel perspective on the future of Islam?

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John Peel Day

Thirty-eight years ago this fall (less than a week after I was born, in fact), BBC Radio 1 went on the air in Great Britain. One of the disk jockeys on the new station was John Peel. One year ago today, John Peel did his last show on Radio 1, though he didn’t know it at the time. He died of a heart attack less than two weeks later in Peru, where he was on a working vacation, looking, as always, for new music. And to commemorate that last show, today is (or was, since it’s now Friday in Great Britain) John Peel Day.

If anyone in the realm of media and popular culture warrants commemoration, it’s John Peel. In his time at Radio 1, he proved incredibly influential, giving early exposure to every new musical movement as it arose, from reggae to punk to hip hop. He was instrumental to the early success of many, many artists, including The Smiths and The White Stripes. And the Peel Sessions archives he left behind provide an unparalleled look at countless artists at work. But more than any of that, what made him so memorable was his overwhelming love of music. You couldn’t listen to even a few minutes of his show without being infected by his obsession. His love of music, though powerful and remarkably wide-ranging, was still informed by a remarkable discernment. And unlike most other media figures of his import and notoriety, he seems by all accounts to have been a truly generous and gentle man. That, like his love of music, was clear from listening to his show, where he often struggled helplessly with the technology of a modern radio program without ever giving in to pique or vitriol.

This week’s episode of the Radio Clash podcast offers a very fitting tribute to John Peel. It’s not a recounting of his life or his work. Instead, it’s an evocation of him and the music he loved (including a killer mash-up of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks,” which is said to have been his favorite song).

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Incivility

The specter of incivility, currently threatening so much of our media and other shared culture, seems recently to be making alarming inroads in the pages of the New York Times Book Review. Last week, there was this in Clive James’s review of Elias Canetti’s Party in the Blitz:

The translator, Michael Hofmann, has found all the right English words for the wartime detail: the V1 was not a rocket, but that mistake was probably in the original text, whose comparative brevity should be taken, I think, as its chief virtue. We are fortunate that there is no more of it, lest we start wondering whether Canetti should not have received another Nobel Prize, for being the biggest twerp of the 20th century. But a twerp must be at least partly stupid, and Canetti wasn’t even a little bit that.

Instead, he was a particularly bright egomaniac, and this book, written when his governing mechanisms were falling to bits, simply shows the limitless reserves of envy and recrimination that had always powered his aloofness. The mystery blows apart, and spatters the reader with scraps and tatters of an artificial superiority.

This week, there’s this in Bryan Burrough’s review of Simon Winchester’s A Crack in the Edge of the World:

Me, I hated it. I wanted to drop-kick this book across the backyard. If Doris Kearns Goodwin or David McCullough can lay claim to being the Miles Davis of popular history, Winchester is becoming the Kenny G.

And also this week, in P. J. O’Rourke’s review of Leslie Savan’s Slam Dunks and No-Brainers, we find this:

And Savan writes that “exactly when cool jelled into the word we know today is difficult to say.” It is not difficult to say upon looking into The Oxford English Dictionary. “Assured and unabashed in demeanor . . . calmly and deliberately audacious or impudent” dates to the 1820’s. But the O.E.D. is not in Savan’s bibliography, which contains “Jones, Gerard. ‘Honey, I’m Home!: Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream'” and “Moore, Michael. ‘Dude, Where’s My Country?'”

Though these insults are witty and well-formed (and they and quips like them make for an amusing recounting in Gawker‘s “Reading About Reading” feature the following week), they really are no more than insults. As Gawker has diligently documented, the Book Review has become more and more like a middlebrow literary exercise in Crossfire style ridicule and riposte. (See? This insult thing is contagious.) The fact that, unlike with other types of reviews, the reviewer and the reviewed often exchanged roles probably helped (a few notable feuds aside) to maintain a certain level of decorum until recently. But once the balance tipped away from decorum, things seem instead to be playing out as the annihilating denouement of a failed arrangement of mutually assured destruction (as those few feuds had already suggested was possible).

But why has this happened just now? The easy answer is that for whatever reason (the lack of mainstream blood sports, public executions, and the like; the growing disconnection between our opinions and the evidence of their consequences; or a societal affluence that grants us the leisure to indulge in such nonsense), the media audience seems to really enjoy watching people insult and degrade each other. And as a visit to most interactive forums on the Internet shows, a significant portion of that audience seems to enjoy participating whenever they get a chance. That the more popular and populist media is willing to serve that appetite isn’t surprising, but why is the New York Times Book Review succumbing to this impulse?

My guess is that it’s the indirect result of another decision the Times made. Almost two years ago, there was a shift in the editorial policy of the Book Review. The editors decided to “skew” it toward non-fiction. As Bill Keller explained, “The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world. Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction.” That may be true, as far as it goes, but it suggests a subtle yet significant change behind in perspective. The contention over ideas had traditionally been the purview of the op-ed page, while the Book Review had been (I naively believed) about the craft of writing. With this change, the line between the op-ed page and the Book Review has become blurred, and I can no longer spend my weekends reading the Book Review in hopes of doing something so quaint as trying to decide which books I’d like to read. Simply put, the New York Times Book Review has surrendered its aesthetic perspective, going from equanimous observer to attached participant. That seems a loss to me.