Literary Safari

I just came across my first “Power of Print” ad in this week’s New Yorker. The title is “Young people do everything online. Like order millions of magazines.”

In case you can’t read the fine print, voila the gist of it:

“Contrary to popular misconception, the phenomenal popularity of the Internet has not come at the expense of magazines. Readership is actually increasing, and adults between 18 and 34 are among the most dedicated readers. They equal or surpass their over-34 counterparts in issues read per month and time spent per issue. What’s changed isn’t people’s affinity for magazines but the means by which they acquire them. Last year, nearly 22 percent of all new paid subscriptions were ordered online. … Some might call it ironic. The medium that some predicted would vanquish magazines is actually helping fuel their growth. And vice versa.”

In case you’re wondering, Magazines: The Power of Print campaign is part of a series of ads paid for by the leaders of five major magazine publishing companies, namely—Charles H. Townsend, Condé Nast; Cathie Black, Hearst Magazines; Jack Griffin, Meredith Corporation; Ann Moore, Time Inc.; and Jann Wenner, Wenner Media.

The goal?

To promote the vitality of magazines as a medium.

Each ad appears on a color spread, accompanied by an iconic image from a well-known magazine. In this instance, we have David LaChapelle’s naked bubbles lady (I don’t really know the title of this photograph) from Rolling Stone, which is quite an unfortunate choice given that the subject of the ad is the reading habits of young people. If I were a teacher and brought this spread in to class as a teaching tool, my head would probably be cut off by many parents. I’m just saying.

(An aside: Funny that the first thing I read this morning in the NY Times looked at how Petit Quotidien, a daily paper for children in France is defying the digital craze.” )

Today marks the seven year anniversary of the Iraq war. There has been very little coverage in the media.

But I’m still thinking about Nina Berman’s series of photographs “Marine Wedding.” On exhibit as part of the Whitney’s Biennial 2010, they are a poignant reminder of the impact and ripple human effects of the war.

The 2006 photographs on view document the marriage of former Marine sergeant Ty Ziegel, then twenty-four, to his high school sweetheart, Renee Kline, twenty-one. After being severely disfigured in a suicide bomber’s attack while stationed in Iraq, Ty underwent fifty reconstructive operations. … Without any staging or direction, Berman took spontaneous photographs of Ty and Renee in the weeks leading up to their wedding day and accompanied them when they had their wedding portrait taken. Her picture of them at the portrait studio conveys an air of alienation between the couple, who separated a few months after their wedding. …

Read and listen to a PBS interview with Berman here.

I’ve been on a brief but wondrous hiatus for the past eight or so weeks, celebrating and treasuring the birth of my daughter who made her very special entrance into this world on September 3rd. I’m not sure whether I’m truly back now or whether this is just a brief hiatus from my maternity sabbatical. We’ll see …

But I thought I’d post a brief little update on a few things I’ve been up to over the past couple of months.

This past summer, I acted as lead content developer and managed the relaunch and redesign of the website of the Student Press Initiative. That site is up and running here.

My article “Rising Tide: The Boom in Historical Fiction About India and the Indian Diaspora” was published in the Summer issue of the journal Multicultural Review. Read it here.

The readers guide I wrote for Ann M. Martin’s Everything for a Dog was published as a super cute bookmark.  Read it here.

The blog Cayenne Lit featured an interview with me last month. Read it here.

I know that writing in my journal after a difficult, traumatic, painful, confusing, or frightening experience always makes me feel better. I emerge from my time of writing slightly more at ease with life’s uncertainties and though I’m not naive enough to think all is well, I do experience a certain sensation of feeling lighter, as if a bit of the load has been lifted.

Researchers have been studying the impact of writing on health for several decades.  James Pennebaker, from the department of psychology at the University of Texas, has written several journal articles and books showing how basic cognitive and linguistic processes during writing predict better health through longterm improvements in moods and even, healthier blood work. [Check out one of his papers here.] Part of his conclusion was that the ideal writing time was 15 minutes of so.

Now, a new study “Effects of (Very) Brief Writing on Health” from the Universiy of Missouri shows that a minimal amount of two minutes a day of writing can attain similar results.

Participants wrote about either a personal trauma, a positive life experience, or a control topic for 2 minutes each day for 2 days. Emotion word usage in the essays was examined and physical health complaints were measured 4–6 weeks after the last writing session. Trauma and positive experience essays
contained more emotional content than the control essays and such content was of a similar percentage to that demonstrated by past research. Both the trauma and the positive experience conditions reported fewer health complaints at follow-up than the control condition.

The study concluded that “it might be enough to take (literally) just a couple minutes to reflect on important life experiences to garner the health benefits of writing.”

Two minutes. It takes two minutes sometimes to check my email on my iPhone, to load a webpage, to wait for the elevator, to pay for a gallon of milk at the corner store, to cross a busy street … Next time I say that I don’t have time to write in my journal, I hope I’ll remember that!

This post comes your way courtesy of the good folks at VSL Science.

Take heart, those of you who feel guilty about not blogging enough or at too leisurely a pace. Per a recent NYT article titled “Blogging at Snail’s Pace,”  there’s a “small, quirky movement” out there called slow blogging:

… inspired by the slow food movement, which says that fast food is destroying local traditions and healthy eating habits. Slow food advocates, like the chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., believe that food should be local, organic and seasonal; slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants — great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the longer haul.

It’s official. I am a slow blogger. The fact that it has taken me a whole week to sit down and even try to write about last week’s events in Mumbai is proof, if nothing else.

Like everyone else I know, I’ve been following the news about the Mumbai blasts last week constantly, keeping track of essays, listening to podcasts, and reading analyses [ [here» ... here» ... here» ... here» ... here»]. I’m repeatedly wowed by all the writers out there who have managed to convey their thoughts and emotions so eloquently both during and in the days since the events.

So far, I haven’t been able to do it.

I ran into a neighbor in the elevator earlier today. “I’ve been thinking about you,” Libby said. “I was wondering whether you have any family in Mumbai and I went onto your blog to see whether you had written anything about it.”

“No, I haven’t,” I replied. “It’s just taking me a while to absorb it all.” I felt embarrassed, like I was somewhat less of a writer for not having put pen to paper right away … or, at the very least, participated in the phenomenon of self-button publishing and citizen journalism via Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

Like so many of my friends, it’s becoming a habit to chirp about my state of mind and the goings-on in my life on Facebook. But, during this frightening, disturbing terrorist and hostage crisis, while the rest of the world has been busy talking, all I was  able to do was listen and take it all in.

My Facebook statuses during the Mumbai crisis:

November 26, 9:48 pm (not too long after the news broke): “Sandhya is watching NDTV live and so sad about the unfolding events in Mumbai.”

November 28, 11:04 am (the standoff continues): “Sandhya is still watching NDTV live.”

November 28, 11:15 am (the standoff continues as does my feeling of helplessness): “Sandhya just signed the awaaz.org’s call for unity.”

November 29, 9:34 am (the faceoff ends): “Sandhya is thankful and relieved.”

Changing my status so infrequently is unusual for me.

The thing is, though, I was overcome with the same kind of numbness that overcame me on 9/11 when I was glued to the news and every source of information I could lay my hands on. Back then, I wanted to know and understand what was happening, but I didn’t have the desire or werewithal to process the events for anyone else.

Back then, we didn’t have Facebook statuses to help us examine our state of mind. Now, all I have to do is look at my minimal Facebook status updates during the three day standoff between the terrorists and the Indian forces to see my mental paralysis reflected.

In this world of instant response, constant tweeting, and simultaneous analysis, I’ve only just started writing about last week’s events and *my* Bombay. I suppose I’m still getting used to the idea that all this has happened; still processing it; still asking “why?” And, I keep reading, taking in all the information out there, hoping to find a clue, a better understanding. Finally, there’s also a part of me that says: What else can I truly add to the ongoing conversation? All I have are my memories of my Bombay to add to the mix. Why do they matter?

But, today, I finally started writing and I realized that my memories of my Bombay matter because they will help me to finally start making sense of this mayhem, this puzzle, this sadness I’m feeling. They will help me to remember the bruised city on the Arabian Sea as it was when I first got to know it. They will help me to break through the numbness. …

All of this is a long-winded way of explaining why this blog has been quiet for the past several days. I didn’t feel right about writing about anything other than Mumbai—and I wasn’t ready to write about my Bombay just yet.

Slowly, at snail’s pace, I’m getting there. Stay tuned …

Irritating words. Clichés. Trite expressions. We hear them all the time and sometimes, we are also guilty of using them in our own writing and conversations.

Here, from Oxford University is a list of top 10 “most irritating phrases.” [see full story]

1 – At the end of the day
2 – Fairly unique
3 – I personally
4 – At this moment in time
5 – With all due respect
6 – Absolutely
7 – It’s a nightmare
8 – Shouldn’t of
9 – 24/7
10 – It’s not rocket science

And, here at Paper Cuts, the NYT literary blog is a list of the “seven deadly words of book reviewing”:

1 – poignant
2 – compelling
3 – intriguing
4 – eschew
5 – craft (used as a verb)
6 – muse (used as a verb)
7 – lyrical

And, so, off I go in search of a better substitute for “compelling” which is often a word that is part of my first draft reviews because I think it’s better than “fascinating” … which, somehow, just does not cut the mustard either!!

Your most irritating phrases?

The day before the election, I wrote a lesson plan for The New York Times Learning Network [And, the Winner Is: Holding a Post-Election Discussion or Mock Talk Show] on how to teach the election in the classroom. The culminating activity of this lesson was for students to write letters to the newly elected President. The morning after Barack Obama’s historic win, I sat down to do the same.  Here’s my letter.

Dear Mr. President-Elect Barack Obama,

Congratulations on your election to the highest office in the land. I am profoundly moved and heartened by the outcome of this election. Last night, outside my window in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City, car horns were blaring, people were screaming and weeping with joy, crowds were chanting your name. On a night replete with the revelry reminiscent of New Year’s Eve—champagne, impromptu parades, Times Square crowds, and even, funky 2008 glasses—I fell asleep thinking: Hope has landed and it’s here to stay.

Though I was born in Ghana and raised in India, I have lived in the Unites States since I was 12. People say that this election is historic because you are the first African-American to be elected president. Yes, that’s true. What’s also true, however, is that your election is of great significance because it has made me feel—perhaps for the first time ever—that just as I call this country home, it too can call me family. Thanks to your vision and “audacity to hope” for change, today, people like me, immigrants, minorities, and people of color—brown, brown, black, yellow, red—we are all brimming with hope for our future in America.

The morning after, I feel like I have woken not just to a new day, but to a new period in history. I keep revisiting your victory speech.

After an election where a certain man named “Joe the Plumber” was touted as the face of America, you addressed and acknowledged our true face and the beauty of our diversity:

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.

You broke the highest glass ceiling in this nation’s history—that of race—last night, and thankfully, you didn’t ignore that fact:

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office.

Yet, you reminded us that nothing is too impossible to be possible:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. (more…)

Originally posted at Sepia Mutiny.

This article buried in the Saturday’s New York Times reports that the Obama campaign has invested heavily in microtargeting.

Microtargeting uses computers and mathematical models to take disparate bits of information about voters — the cars they own, the groups they belong to, the magazines they read — and analyze it in a way to predict how likely a person is to vote and what issues and values are most important to him. Often these analyses turn up surprising results; for instance, Democrats have taken advantage of the fact that many evangelical Christians are open to hearing a pro-environmental message.

Though this is technique has long been favored by the Republican party, especially during the 2000 Bush campaign, even Republicans agree that he “Obama campaign has appropriated it and taken it to a new level.”

One of the largest data banks is Catalist, a for-profit company that specializes in providing data for the Obama campaign. Turns out its chief technology officer is 34 year old Vijay Ravindran, former director of the ordering-services group at Amazon.com, where he led a team of about 130 engineers who built and maintained the site’s “shopping cart.

From the Washington Post:

The work being done in Catalist’s McPherson Square offices—which, with its multiscreen computer terminals, resembles a Silicon Valley start-up—is helping revolutionize the fields known as data mining and microtargeting. … Catalist was founded in August 2005 by Harold Ickes, the longtime Clinton deputy White House chief of staff, after the 2004 campaign to address the Democrats’ inability to harness data. One of the first hires was a young engineer, Vijay Ravindran. … “With my hiring, he made a decision that this was going to be a real company,” Ravindran says. As the chief data-architecture guy at Catalist, he’s part of a new trend in political technology: As data become more important in campaigning, candidates are increasingly turning to the tech industry for business-level expertise.

In a feature on political strategists and microtargeting, from fastcompany.com [via the newstab, thanks brijo1], Ravindran says:

“In the political space, I felt it was very important to build a computing architecture that would take in real-time data, get them into a standardized format, and then load them into a place where they could be snapshotted out for particular purposes. That didn’t exist before. Now we have an architecture that scales more than 15 terabytes of data while providing an interface for users to work with. We expect to leave this election cycle with a piece of permanent infrastructure that enables groups to do microtargeting more efficiently than ever before. It all boils down to one principle: Leave no data behind.”

Below the fold is a video where Ravindran talks a little bit about what he does.

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Though comics and graphic novels have been in the publishing spotlight in recent years, educational publishers and teachers still approach them with cold hands and tentative minds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, when presented with a worthy and quite literary comic book, “Oh, but it’s just a comic. We can’t give kids such watered down stuff to read.”

The summer 2008 issue of Teachers & Writers magazine speaks directly to these concerns, serving up a selection of articles which effectively make the case that yes, “writing and reading comics can strengthen writing skills, spur the imagination, and boost literacy in classrooms from kindergarten to college and beyond.”

As a former editor in the educational publishing industry, the “fearful editorial culture” that Sari Wilson describes in “The Comics Revolution in the Language Arts Classroom” was all too real to me. I too have encountered the same challenges and obstacles of which she speaks. Many of the graphic novel excerpts I pitched for inclusion in our product were rejected not because they were deemed not engaging enough, but because of concerns about them “looking too much like a comic book” or not appearing “meaty enough” in terms of sentence length.

At the end of the day, much of the industry seems to feel caught between wanting to provide students with “traditional” or “award-winning” literature (read: a high-enough lexile text) and “high-interest” content (read: cool illustrations and graphics). Somehow, the notion that the two can coexist in a single text (read: graphic novel or story) that tastefully blends the elements of storytelling with sophisticated visuals is still not an accepted one. This is unfortunate because as a result students may very well miss out on being able to dissect, critique, analyze, respond to, and enjoy many worthy works that are categorized in the comics section of a bookstore.

In my opinion, this “either-or”attitude results in somewhat of a vicious cycle: On one hand, publishers are nervous about featuring excerpts from works such as “American Born Chinese” by Gene Yang in their textbooks because they worry about the teachers‘ response -“Will he or she be able to handle student responses?” On the other hand, teachers are worried about introducing similar works to their students in the classroom as part of the curriculum because they don’t see them in textbooks, and therefore, don’t want to seem to be loosening curriculum standards.

As I was going through the T&W comics issue, I was struck by the many examples provided of how comics can open for readers and non-readers alike, writers and non-writers alike. There are some amazing people doing some incredible work out there in this field. [more below the fold] (more…)

By way of Paper Cuts, news of Sangam House, a new international writers residency program in Pondicherry, India, a town in South India known best for Auroville, the “township devoted to an experiment in human unity.”

Sangam House is a brand new undertaking, a partnership between the Danish Council for the Arts, Finnish Literature Exchange, Random House India, the Sahitya Akademi for the Letters, and freeDimensional, an organization dedicated to finding safe havens for artists of all disciplines who have been put in danger directly because of their work.Applications for the inaugural residency session this winter are currently being accepted. From the website:

The word sangam in Sanskrit literally means “going together.” In most Indian languages, sangam has come to mean such confluences as the flowing together of rivers and coincidence. The intention of Sangam House is to bring together writers from around the world to live and work in a safe, peaceful setting. The world we live in makes a space such as this necessary on many levels.

Assembling writers from various cultural backgrounds broadens the scope of each individual’s work. Exposure to regional and national trends in literature, to multiple political and economic obstacles and varied social and cultural milieus enhances each writer’s understanding of his/her work, as well as his/her own notions of identity and home.

… Most importantly, our residency programs are designed for writers who have published to some acclaim but not yet enjoyed substantial commercial success. Sangam House seeks to give writers (and we include here translators, poets, playwrights and those involved in creating fiction and non-fiction works) a chance to build a substantial and influential network of personal and professional relationships that can deepen their own work, in effect, expanding and diversifying literature. We understand that literature can and should evolve, allowing it to remain a thriving force of illumination for our times.

More on application guidelines here.

And, while we’re at it, other artist’s residency opportunities in India:In New Delhi, Global Arts Village and in Bangalore, Khoj International Artists Association.

Those who know me well often joke that I’d make a good spokesperson for a Google ad. I can’t help it if Google has changed my life (and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way). The google desktop app has saved my writing life more times than I care to mention, and google calendar is the means by which my husband and I can always convince each other to attend otherwise resisted events (“Oh, you couldn’t make it? I had no idea. Your google calendar said you were free!”)So, of course, my curiosity piqued when I recently read about Siva Vaidhyanathan’s recent book deal with the University of California Press.

Per Publisher’s Weekly:

THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING: How one company is transforming culture, commerce and community – and why we should worry, showing how Google is taking on governments, organizations and entire industries – and the implications of Google knowing more about us than we know about it.

(The book began as an open book experiment sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book, where Vaidhyanathan is a fellow, and was subsequently picked up for publication.)

Vaidhyanathan is a rising cultural historian and media scholar whose two previous books Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System have met with wide praise.

He is approaching the book as both a fan and as a critic, he says at his website: “I am in awe of all that Google has done and all it hopes to do. I am also wary of its ambition and power.”

In a talk titled “The Googlization of Everything” that he gave last week at Penn State, Vaidhyanathan used the example of a google search result of the word “Siva” (the #1 result is the Smashing Pumpkins 1991 music video for “Siva,” not the Hindu god of the same name) to raise the question of just how universal Google actually is.

From an article in Penn State’s campus paper The Collegian Online:

“The Smashing Pumpkins were a once relevant band from Chicago,” Siva Vaidhyanathan said. “There are a billion Hindus … You would think that would be the most important thing. This gives us some indication that the Google universe does not map to the rest of the world.” …

[If you run the search yourself, a list of his books comes up first under Google Books, then the Smashing Pumpkins, then a wikipedia write-up on “Shiva” (the more common spelling for the Hindu god of destruction), then his website. Hmmm….] From the same article:

“Google actually has a pretty profound and perhaps disturbing role in what we consider to be valuable, true and important … “Millions, perhaps billions, of people use Google everyday. We are not Google’s consumers; we are Google’s products. The advertisers are the consumers,” Vaidhyanathan said, [criticizing Google’s collection of detailed records and user information.] … “Google knows everything about many of us and a lot about almost all of us. Google knows your interests, your passions, maybe your fetishes.” Vaidhyanathan pointed to Google’s official mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” “It’s a stunning mission statement for any company,” he said. “But it’s the universality we have to question. How universal is Google? We know it doesn’t work exactly the same way in China.”

Vaidhyanathan’s starting point is that Google is a part of our lives and that we talk about it as though it were Divine — think of the good versus evil paradigm that has been set up in the google universe — but that it is something we need to take a closer look at, especially when it comes to consumer surveillance and copyright.

From another interesting article at the U. Va. website: “Discussing the role of the consumer, Siva notes another Google illusion – that of the free service. We pay for Google with our data – our searching habits, our surfing habits – and this fuels Google’s cash cow, personalized advertising.” [link]

The book will be out sometime next year, and in the meantime, we’ll all keep using our various google apps and accounts more than ever … won’t we?

Read this post at Sepia Mutiny.

A current event take on my off-and-on Family Ruminations series. You can read the conversations it generated over at Sepia Mutiny, where this was originally posted.

Representatives from 14 African nations were in New Delhi for the first-ever India-Africa summit, which just ended today. (The India-Africa Summit follows closely on the heels of the China-Africa summit of November 2006.)

Attendees signed off on the Delhi Declaration and the Africa-India Framework for Cooperation, pledging cooperation in the areas of energy, terrorism, climate change and UN Reforms. An informal and equally important outcome: India is looking to play a far more prominent role in Africa’s economic development than China in coming years.

My uncle Gobind is a retired World Bank developmental economist who has served as economic adviser to the government of Ghana. I asked him to share his thoughts on this historic summit.

“While India is less prominent than China in Africa today, both in trade and investments and aid,” he said, “it is more respected than China because of its image, its democracy, its presence in education, industry— especially pharmaceuticals and railways, and IT. There is growing interest in Africa in India, but it is not yet a hot issue, except for mining companies and the new private oil companies like Reliance. India is currently big in Sudan, DRC, Nigeria, Zambia and S. Africa. But it’s increasing its presence everywhere.”

The Emerging Economy report, released yesterday, underlined the role of Indian corporations in driving new technology usage in Africa. From the Earth Times [full story link]:

Chinese corporations have made significant investments in Africa over the past decade. For example, China’s Civil Engineering Construction Corporation is building the $8.3 billion railroad linking Lagos and Kano. However, the Report also points out that Indian entrepreneurs have long enjoyed trading relations in Africa, particularly along the continent’s east coast, running from Kenya down to the tip of South Africa. In the early part of the 20th century Indian engineering and consumer brands were considered as reliable as those coming from Europe. Bilateral trade between India and Africa increased from less than US$ 1 billion in 1991 to over US$ 9 billion in 2005. Today, the Government of India is aiming to achieve a trade turnover of US$ 500 billion by 2010.

My grandfather might be one of those Indian entrepreneurs referred to above. In the 1930s, Dada came to West Africa as apprentice to an Indian trading company. He ended up placing his roots down in Ghana where he opened a chain of movie theaters and imported movies from India and China for a rural audience.

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