Daily dose of voyeurism

Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside

The article explains the plight of one Jeffrey Deskovic, wrongly convicted of a rape and killing sixteen years ago. Mr. Deskovic was exonerated through DNA evidence in 2006.

There is a story here, but not one that can be told in the column inches of a newspaper, and especially not one that resorts to cheap stunts to heighten the reader's emotional response while quietly manipulating him.

For example, the first lines --

As a boy, Jeffrey Mark Deskovic could swim the length of a pool underwater without coming up for air. On sultry days at the Elmira state prison, where he spent most of his 16 years behind bars for a rape and murder he did not commit, Mr. Deskovic would close his eyes under a row of outdoor showers and imagine himself swimming.

See how easily Mr. Deskovic's complex emotional response is condensed for public consumption? He was a swimmer, readers, and now, in jail, he can only imagine swimming! Isn't that sad? Don't you feel for him, reader?

Some later lines --

He had never lived alone, owned a car, scanned the classifieds in search of work. He had never voted, balanced a checkbook or learned to knot a tie.

He missed the senior prom, the funeral of the grandmother who helped raise him, and his best friend’s wedding.

And, of course, the obligatory --

He said he had never made love.

Yes, can you imagine, reader? You, who take these things for granted, the knotting of ties, the attending of funerals, the making of love? Don't you feel for him?

No, you don't. Because the article depends on gawking at the man and taking an almost vindictive pleasure in enumerating his sorrows, the only thing it extracts from the reader is a reaction of pity. No attempt is made to portray Mr. Deskovic as a real human being; he is made out instead to be a degraded showpiece, losing all dignity in the face of this caricaturing of his life.

The New York Times is far from the only medium culpable; in fact, it seems that most American media is preoccupied with trying to peer into people's personal lives. Fox News, for example, uses its prime-time news broadcasts mainly to discuss rapes and murders of beautiful young women. TLC (The Learning Channel) ensures increased viewership by broadcasting graphic images of morbidly obese men and women undergoing medical treatment. Larry King and his ilk conduct celebrity interviews that reveal their subjects' personal lives in lurid detail. And so on.

To deplore this sort of relentless voyeurism, though, is misguided. We are all of us despicable in our own separate ways; who cannot claim to derive pleasure from another's pain? Which one among us is so enlightened that the fall of a famous personality does not cheer us in some undefinable way? If empathy is a human trait, then so is condescension. We can hope to preserve some sense of self-superiority by such contrived socially endorsed acts of disapproval; but dignity? Not a chance.

Read this article...

....and tell me if you don't think it contains the most hackneyed examples of pseudo-metaphorical bombast currently in existence.


Croatia end woeful England's Euro dream

Pakistan off the Commonwealth

Apart from the consequences for world politics, this also means that Pakistani writers will be ineligible for Booker Prize nomination. Bye bye Mohsin Hamid.

Writing = empathy

Great books are filters, distilling from the everyday simple truths about our condition. They station themselves in the lives of their characters, and are content simply to observe; guileless, incapable of judgment, and completely unselfconscious, they invest in each of their characters a degree of empathy unqualified by the trammels of diurnal social discourse.

'A House for Mr. Biswas' is such a book. Set in the poverty stricken backdrop of rural Trinidad in the mid-twentieth century, the novel explores themes of longing and alienation while taking us through the life of the eponymous Mohun Biswas. The book deals with its subject matter compassionately but without degenerating, as lesser books usually do, into the sort of cloying sentimentality that makes one want to stop reading. It is also very well written -- the prose is subtle and graceful, and achieves powerful imagery through understatement.

As I read 'Biswas', I saw my own role changing as the pages sped by. From being more or less an interested observer, I was transformed first into a person who sympathized deeply, and then, inexorably, into one who felt as the characters, who felt with them. Identifying with the protagonist of a storyline is one thing -- the stuff of most hero-villain yarns -- but, as you might discover if you read this book, identifying with every single character can quickly turn into an almost sacred exercise in catharsis.

Saturday

Saturday,
The constant chatter of the week is replaced,
with a soft distant scrape.

You fight through a maze
of despondence,
through the noon hour.

Paper on the floor,
sticks to your feet.
You shake it off.

Evening arrives to find you
salivating, face against
pillow. You snore.

Outside, unseen,
lights of cars smear
on walls opposing.

And would you
show yourself?
Would you feel?

Saturday,
The trash man
will not come.

(insert non-literal title here)

If I look at this picture for more than a few minutes, I begin to feel a little sentimental. How young we were, I begin to think. How many minutes have passed since then. Where are they now, my companions in this photograph? How far we have all come.

Then I log on to orkut, and see most of the other people in the photograph, going about their lives as normal, as accessible to me as they were twenty years ago. The nostalgic peremptoriness of a few seconds ago vanishes, replacing itself with a faint disregard for the people concerned. The photograph loses its beauty, becomes almost banal. I feel cheated.

In this world of email and social networking, can we still feel?

Literary references...

...by their very nature, tend to obfuscate.

This blog, for example, frequently finds it tempting to insert literary allusions in its posts as an attempt to convince its imaginary audience of its author's erudition. Such posts might include quotes like the one below(by Karen Blixen, also known as Isak Dinesen) to make a point that may or may not be orthogonal to the semantics of the passage itself.

and you, Marcus, have given me many things; now I shall give you this good advice. Be many people. Give up the game of being always Marcus Cocoza. You have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave and prisoner. You have not done anything without first considering how it would affect Marcus Cocoza's happiness and prestige. You were always much afraid that Marcus might do a stupid thing, or be bored. What would it really have mattered? All over the world people are doing stupid things... I should like you to be easy, your little heart to be light again. You must from now, be more than one, many people, as many as you can think of.

The gratuitous and (in the opinion of this blog's, at least) gauche display of soi-disant learnedness serves only to communicate the author's inability to explain the thrust of his argument by more direct means. By deferring to an authority higher than himself, the author displays an intellectual timidity that no degree of literary knowledge, however eclectic, can allay.

It is this blog's humble thesis, therefore, that overt references to works of literature be abandoned in essays that seek to divulge the motivations of an argument.

PS: An attempt to write in a more Nabokovian style.