The Oncoming Hope

I think the most important thing to take away from Doll's House in its entirety is that Rose is pretty awesome. I admit I was worried when we first met her, but she has more than redeemed herself. I'm not sure I've loved her more than this moment:

"I don't understand it, but I believe it."

No whining, no existential crises, just a simple acknowledgment of what's happening. Sure, she's a little confused as to WHY it's happening, but aren't we all?

"AND THEN SHE WOKE UP"

That is one of the classic "twists" that creative writing classes try to prevent. You know the ones: it was all a dream, actually this is purgatory, we've all been trippin' on PCP, etc. But if ever the line "and then she woke up" is appropriate, it's here. It's a credit to Gaiman's restraint that he hasn't used this line until now.

In fact, he's killing two cliches in one stone: not only does the phrase end the previous story, it begins Rose's new story. And waking up is equally hackneyed at the front of a story as at the end. But it feels right here. Beautiful even.

That said, there is another twist that does not really work for me: that Unity is in fact the Vortex, and Rose somehow inherits that status. It's a handy way to keep Rose alive and fulfil Unity's purpose, but the whole creation of the Vortex mystifies me. So Desire had sex with Unity and therefore Unity becomes the Vortex? Til now, I thought it was some random aligning of the cosmos that selected Rose Walker, and I would have been more satisfied if that was the case. The new twist means that not only is Dream a servant, a doll, of humanity, he can't even protect his domain from his less powerful younger sister. And I don't like the implications of that. It weakens him as a character.

Also, at the moment Desire's scheming feels extremely pointless. Creating Morpheus's love for Nada, yes, that makes sense within the context of what we know about Desire. But to what end would Desire have Dream kill one of his own family? By manipulating him to do so, she is not influencing his desires at all; he merely acts to destroy the Vortex out of responsibility to his kingdom.

Separately, now that I'm thinking about it, isn't it possible that Desire's act actually SAVED the Dreaming? When Unity Kincaid came of age to become the vortex, Dream was trapped and wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. His kingdom was in tatters, his powers at an all time low. Unity might actually have destroyed the Dreaming completely. So by moving the Vortex down a couple of generations, didn't Desire inadvertently create a situation where he could act to save his domain? I wouldn't accuse Desire of anything altruistic; she probably didn't know. But oh, the vagaries of chance.

ON DOMAINS

See, didn't I tell you domains are important? Gilbert isn't a who, but a place. He is a domain unto himself, but isn't even master of his own domain. It's such a lovely idea, that places have character and personality. This is one of the ideas that really stuck with me long after I first read Sandman.

"What a wonderful place!"

"Yeah, it was a friend of mine."

LOOKING FORWARD

Doll's House as a whole sets up many characters and themes that will dominate the series in later issues; pay attention to the denizens of the Doll's House, for they do not emerge unscathed from their proximity to the vortex.

I am going to pay a lot more attention to Desire's actions, because even when I first read the series I did not give them a whole lot of consideration. Of course she's important as a facet of humanity, but I want to pinpoint her importance to the Endless, to this particular universe, apart from being an irritatingly smug thorn in everyone's side.

As always, you too can read the story here: "What Molly Knew"

There are things the story handles remarkably well, and things it doesn't. It was overly expository. It seemed to "tell" rather than "show" for the most part. But at last, we're in a story that has policemen instead of soldiers, working class poverty instead of famine, telephones instead of letters to nobody. A lot of my fellow bloggers have said this is their favorite story so far: I agree. It's still a major downer, but at least it's not poverty porn.

I feel like the story really hinges on how we, the reader, feel about Molly. I get the feeling the author expects us to sympathize with her, but I find myself disliking her immensely, never more than when she burns the letter her daughter wrote. That act perhaps functions better as a metaphor for colonialization; the colonial powers know what they did, they accept it, and then they attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility by ratcheting up or even creating tensions between disparate groups. So the powers arbitrarily divide India and Pakistan, moves Israelis into Palestine, invent racial disparity between Hutus and Tutsis, and so on. It's the most devious sort of scorched earth policy, where contemporary political scientists ignore the fact that the colonialists started it all, and just blame "racial conflagrations" instead.

But it basically tells me that Molly has no interest in her own agency. She's not being deprived of it; she could take that letter to the Inspector, she could get her husband thrown in jail, she could have listened and believed what her daughter had been trying to tell her for years. But no. She's utterly passive. She has no interest in her own fate, therefore it's impossible for me to have an interest in her fate. In fact, by burning the letter she actually decides to be active instead of passive, and to ACT AGAINST her own interest, the interest of her son-in-law, and continue to act against the interest of her daughter.

Rollo may have raped Sarah, but Molly could have stopped it at any time. And that makes her reprehensible. On a personal note, I very much believe that many of society's ills are accounted for by people acting flagrantly against their own rational self-interest, certainly in the United States at least. So it really bothers me to see Molly handicap herself in this way.

I feel like this might have  been alleviated in two ways: first, Rollo could have been less of a cartoon villain. There is literally NOTHING redeeming about him. And I'm sorry, hunger pangs do not overall fear of nightly beatings and rape of your daughter unless there's some other attraction to him. But there isn't. Second, Keegan could have clarified the relationship between Molly and Sarah. That relationship never comes alive to me, it's never clear why Molly would simply sacrifice her for her own contentment/survival. The author keeps saying how much Molly loves Sarah, but nothing she does is an act of love toward her daughter.

All that said, I did enjoy the mystery around the son-in-law. We really don't get to know him very well, but what we do learn makes me want to know more. His internal contradictions are lovely ways to show how race and nationality aren't as clear-cut as we like to think.

Feel free to weigh in in the comments. How did you feel about this story? About Molly?

IN SUM:

Read it, read it now, and love it. It's the perfect antidote to my obsession with Infinite Jest, it's fun, it's fast, it's dark and it's plotty. And you won't be able to put it down (I certainly couldn't. Nor the sequel. OMG is that the sun coming up?). Just be warned: it's easily the most violent novel written since Clockwork Orange.

WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT:

Picture America as a giant Cost-Co, with the center, the Capitol, overseeingly 12 districts that each concentrate on different goods: electronics, coal, agricultural goods, etc. 75 years before, the districts rebelled against the tyranny of the capitol, which was committed to leaving District citizens in lives of poverty and hardship. But they failed. Now, each District is required to give two teenagers in tribute to fight a battle to the death. Naturally, this is the must-see television event of the year.

THOUGHTS

Ok, so far so Battle Royale, right? In truth the opening scenes of selecting the candidates for the Hunger Games by lottery reminded me of, well, The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson. (And also Ursula K. Leguin's "The Ones from Omelas", to a lesser extent.)

But the main strength of the novel lies in Collins's treatment of her setting. She treats it with seriousness and with gravity, not with irony. Her satire of the military-entertainment complex is subtle and barbed, not an excuse to fill the novel with cheap jokes about reality tv. (In fact, by giving the residents of the Capitol Roman names, one is put more in mind of Gladiators than of reality television. I suspect Collins is making a point about the timelessness of human cruelty, the ultimate cruelty being the ability to a) look the other way from it and b) watch it happening and remain indifferent.)

Our erstwhile protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, volunteers to be the District 12 tribute in place of her EXTREMELY, dare I say ANNOYINGLY beloved sister, Prim. (Prim is the Beth March character, loved because she's "nice and kind," and therefore I assume she's definitely toast by the end of the series). She leaves poverty-stricken District 12 for the Capitol, an Eloi-land populated by indolent fashionistas who sit around gorging themselves. But in a way, just as all the districts are imprisoned into glorified labor camps, the Capitol is imprisoned by its own vices. In this division of labor, they are the entertainment labor.

Like most quality dystopian fiction, the book leaves us considering the subtle implications of our own public policy, in this case about the nature of exploitation and labor division. In some ways, Panem is the desired conclusion of free market policy; the goal of global free markets is that different nations specialize in producing whatever they are competitively superior at producing (i.e. one nation provides labor, one nature provides technology, one provides textiles, one provides agriculture, etc.) Of course, the instant you throw a totalitarian government into the mix you get communo-fascism. Basically, Panem is China.

Anyway.

And speaking of watching and doing nothing, we are the voyeurs who cannot look away. What happens to Katniss, the entire structure of the Games themselves, is absolutely brutal. I've never seen such violence. God only knows how they're going to make a sub-R movie of this considering all the blood, dismemberment and general horror (and nudity! Did I mention all the random nudity? People just strip off randomly and let people stare at them).

So when Katniss is in danger, we really feel she's in danger.

I feel it necessary at this point to convey my extreme love for Katniss Everdeen. She is a total badass. I find it fascinating that Collins doesn't fall into the conceit of making her some kind of perfect moralist; Katniss is very, very flawed, and that's what makes her unpredictable. She has serious misgivings about what she's been asked to do, but when push comes to shove, she finds more clever and more brutal ways to murder her competitors than anyone else. For that is the true horror of the Games; it exists not just to control society, but to dehumanize its citizens. Victors of the Games don't move on to glory and happiness; they live lives of gin-soaked guilt like Haymitch.

QUIBBLES:

• I don't know if I missed something important, but there's a sequence in the novel where Katniss seems to wake up in her tree, have a few thoughts, then go back to sleep. This happens about four times in a row, and I just kept wondering where the other hunters were. She wasn't injured, I don't think, so it was just strange. It was a strange, improbably interlude that stands out in a novel where everything feels entirely too plausible.
• Now, one of my favorite things about this novel was the fake romance that had to be drummed up between Peeta and Katniss. It was entertaining and uncomfortable at every level, and I loved how Katniss treated it as a matter of practicality (did I mention that I love Katniss?). But I'm not so keen on how the cliffhanger was a romantic twist rather than a more general plot twist. It made me worry that the sequel would focus too much on teen love angst (and for the record, I was right). That said, I did fall head-over-heels in love with Peeta in this.

Being a total mongrel (I'm a first generation Indian-American who grew up in Texas, California, Indonesia, and India and now lives in London) I don't have the clearest concept of "home" or "hometowns" or "home countries" or any of that. So when I get homesick, I get homesick not for places, but for food (and people, of course). The thing is, as a born and bred Texan, I get equally homesick for the healthy South Indian food I grew up with as I do for Mexican food of all varieties (Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, Indo-Mex, Mex-Mex, you name it).

Boy, when I need Mexican food, I have to have Mexican food. London is not great for this, admittedly. Luckily there are two burrito places within 5 minutes walking that are, in my opinion, superior to Chipotle. And of course there's Wahaca, which has possibly the best Mexican food I've ever had anywhere.

But if you're desperate for comfort food and don't want to eat out, let's face it. You can't really whip up an easy enchilada.

But the foods of my ancestral home? Far simpler (perhaps not simpler, but certainly less effortful).

Which brings me to Dal, the savory yellow porridge that feeds millions every day. I can't pretend to cook any South Indian food as well as my mother or my grandmother, except for Dal. I default to it so often that I've experimented it into relative perfection (spicy, tangy, umami with a hint of sweetness).

It's cheap, it's easy, and it's quick. What's better than that?

Serves 6

Ingredients:

For pressure cooking:

• 1 cup yellow dal (doesn't matter which, but moong tends to give the best texture)
• 2 fresh tomatoes (chopped), or half a can of diced tomatoes
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1/2 inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced
• 2 green chillies, slit down the middle
• Optional: Any vegetable, preferably zucchini
• Optional: Fenugreek/methi if you have it

For the tadka (lightly fried spices that go in at the end):

• 1 tbsp oil of your choosing (olive is healthiest though, folks)
• 2 dried red chillies
• 1 tbsp mustard seeds
• 1 tbsp cumin seeds
• 1 tbsp coriander seeds
• Pinch of asafoetida

Before serving:

• 1 tbsp salt
• Mango powder/lime juice
• Fresh coriander
• Rice or Chapati/Nan, whatever you prefer (I choose rice every time)

Recipe

1. Place first set of ingredients into the pressure cooker along with FOUR cups of water. (If you don't have a pressure cooker, then you're gonna have to leave it to boil for AGES. Ages in this case defined as "around 30 minutes on medium-high but pay attention"
2. Let cook until you hear FOUR whistles, which typically takes 5 minutes in all.
3. Remove lid once pressure is released, and turn on to low heat. Add water if it's a little thick for your taste (I like it thick myself. That's what she said.)
4. Once the dal is cooked, heat oil in frying pan.
5. First put the mustard seeds. Once they start crackling, add the rest of the spices.
6. Once they're cooked, (I wish I had a handy way of telling you how you know they're cooked, but I don't. This is when the old olfactory gland is useful, I find), add them to the dal in the pressure cooker.
7. Add salt, and let simmer for about 5 minutes, then turn off heat and add lime/lemon juice or mango powder (or something tart) to taste. Also coriander leaves.
8. Serve with rice or bread, or eat on its own.

Variations: I like to add green peas, but I know that's not always a popular choice, but hey.

And there you have it! Our first edition of Oncoming Comfort Foods. (and oncoming foods in general).

Weigh in in the comments. What are your favorite comfort foods? Do you have any special "dal" tricks?

I was going to set the tone for the blog redesign with something serious and ponderous, but then I saw Katy Perry's new video and it was all over.

Like,

Why is Kenny G in this?

And DEBBIE GIBSON? (which reminds me, I need to see Dinosaur vs. Sharktopus)

And COREY FELDMAN? (I thought he was dead, but turns out that's the other Corey!)

And HANSON?!? Like, seriously, HANSON?!?

This is the most ridiculous video in the history of music videos, and I love it.

Not to mention how Katy Perry runs through the John Hughes geek characters, for which I give massive respect.

Song sucks, as you would expect, but that's totally irrelevant in this case :).

SANDMAN MEETS INFINITE JEST:

Part of the reason I've been a little lax about these Sandman Re-Blogs is that I've been sucked into the bottomless abyss that is Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. These are not two works that you would imagine a lot of crossover with, but more and more I can't help thinking what a great comic book series Infinite Jest would make. In fact, Wallace's trademark footnotes would work perfectly well as the sort of asides that are common in Sandman: quick cuts to the Dreaming, stray thoughts invading, passages and passages of loving description converted into art, etc.

In this issue, especially, the parallels leap out, particularly in regard to our friendly gothic sisters, Chantal and Zelda. Here, as with Joelle van Dyne, we have two beautiful girls with no outward deformity hiding behind veils. Chantal dreams of perfect sentences, as does Avril Incandenza. They are both willfully committed to this Doll's House.

In many ways, the Doll's House is the equivalent of Ennet House in IJ: these people aren't trapped there, they aren't locked in, they can leave at will, but for various reasons they don't (at least not yet). They are drawn body and soul to this place, whether that's because of Rose or whether that's because of something else within themselves. (Does this make Don Gately a vortex?)

We meet Gilbert the same way we meet Lenz: in a dark alley, dressed as a vigilante superhero. Like Lenz, Gilbert has other places to be, but he's content to be here (more than content, actually). Gilbert is not a serial killer in training though, of course.

But apart from the superficial similarity, there's a larger confluence in theme: these are people regarded as grotesques by mainstream society and are searching to find their true humanity, which seems only accessible in non-reality i.e. dreams in Sandman or addiction in Infinite Jest.

Likewise, dreams reveal lack of humanity. Look at Ken, going through the motions. In his dreams he is everything he wants to be, and what he wants to be isn't human at all, it's a caricature, it's a Bret Easton Ellis stereotype.

ON CITIES AND DOMAINS:

I said I'd come back to the whole issue of space and city and domain, and here we are. 
We are introduced to the necropolis in Zelda's dream: the city of the dead.

I believe I'd discussed before how the Dreaming appears to operate as a quasi-feudal system, with Dream sitting in the throne room, not micro-managing, but broadly guiding the kingdom. So it's interesting when Rose says "Each mind creates and inhabits its own world, and each world is but a tiny part of that totality that is the dreaming..." and then proceeds to break down the boundaries to create a single dreaming. So that suggests me that rather than executive ruler, Dream is more of a judiciary leader, a Supreme Court of sorts dedicated to maintaining the separation of different dreams. He creates and administers the rules, (and punishes offenders like the Corinthian) but does not govern the whole of the Dreaming. He just governs his judicial branch, as it were, with Lucien, Matthew, et al.

OTHER:

I'm probably not the first to comment on this, but I do wonder about Zelda being drawn explicitly in the style of John Tenniel's original Alice in Wonderland illustrations: See Alice Here. Going by the stories being told, it would be more fitting for Barbie to be drawn in that style, as she enters a sort of late Victorian fairytale herself, complete with anthropomorphic animals and magical talismans.

Next Issue: We Conclude The Doll's House

I chose this because of a fantastic BBC documentary series I've been watching by the same name, which essentially traces the democratizing effects of networks and systems from Ayn Rand's thought through Silicon Valley's network utopians and then back through nature itself.

I've been reading a lot of Brautigan over the past year, but this is a different beast. Rather than his typical humorous anti-poetry, here he expresses sentiments that might have inspired Philip K. Dick dystopia.

It sums up the political theory driving the whole series: that computer systems will replace so-called governance as the guidance for ordered society, but only if man can create computer networks as free, open and structured as ecological systems.

I honestly wonder if some BBC producer read this poem and then created a documentary series to illustrate it.

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"
by Richard Brautigan

I'd like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think

• (right now, please!)

of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

• (it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Well folks, they've just announced the 2011 shortlist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, featuring five short stories (all are available to read at the website linked). I'm joining the wonderful Aaron Bady at zunguzungu, along with a few other bloggers, in reading and reviewing the pieces before the winner is announced.

I'm going to be honest from the get-go: I cannot provide the depth and quality of socio-political analysis that Aaron can regarding the African continent, so I won't even try. I'm going to focus on the works from an English literature perspective with a touch of international politics.

The prize will be announced in five weeks, so you'll be getting one review per week. But enough business, let's move on to the first story!

"Hitting Budapest" by Noviolet Bulawayo

The first thing that strikes me about this story is its strong sense of internal rhythm, almost childlike, and certainly accidental.

There's an interesting juxtaposition of dream vs. resignation within the story, the consequences of which are conveyed through basic childhood emotions of greed or jealousy and desires for conformity (if I'm a miserable Bastard, than you need to be one too).

I'm usually a bit wary of having this type of story told through the eyes of children (often the results and so-called insights are banal and cheaply manipulative) but Bulawayo takes the "Lord of the Flies" approach of conveying difficult conditions through dark humor rather than the Barbara Kingsolver approach of "and then they must kill their own babies! See who horrible their lives are? Cry now."

This is the power of hearing these stories from the voices of the native writers. Western writers, no matter how well intentioned, cannot help but inject heaping doses of pity, cannot help amplify the misery so that they can make themselves feel more grateful about their own world.

Instead, we get to hear from writers for whom this is reality, not tourism. Because it's their reality, they learn to accept it, not spend the entirety of their time looking for greener grass. Even when Darling states his life plan of moving to America, we get a subtle hint that that's not just a dream, or a hope, but something more simple. He wants to lord it over his friend that he could potentially get out, and Bastard can't.

It's this tension between the harsh conditions and adolescent one upmanship that drives the story forward. In this simple childhood play lies the seeds of violence, of corruption. Right now, when faced head on with their deprivation in the form of lust for the visitor's tossed away food, they scream like animals outside her house. When faced again and again with that deprivation, how will these children contort? What will they become?

ETA:

Here are links to other excellent posts on the subject (many are not as kind as I am, but I always say look for the bright side! And the line "because her grandfather made her pregnant" really does hit like a soppy ton of bricks. But jump into the conversation!