Posts filed under 'consumerism'

The Dance of Śiva

Śiva moves in dance, in sculpture, in painting, in poetry, in ritual, in physics . . . And still he is not done. What are we to do?

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this essay, Kanya Kanchana follows the whirling story of Śiva through dance, science, and myth.

“A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories.” 

– Roberto Calasso,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

There was sound and the sound was colossal. From within the pulsing sound, from the heart of the creation and dissolution of the cosmos, a single beat could be heard—ḍam. Incantatory, the beat started to repeat—ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam. The beat was coming from the ḍamaru, a small handheld drum. There was a god and he was dancing. He was Śiva and he shook all the worlds. 

His matted locks flew wild. Gaṅgā, the holiest of rivers who was nestled in them, swelled in spate, tried in vain to keep him cool. The lambent crescent moon that adorned them, intoxicating soma, now glinted crazily. Vāsukī, the great serpent coiled around his blue, kālakūṭa-holding throat, reeled. Śiva’s locks were a forest (jaṭa, matted locks; aṭavī, forest, as the asura king Rāvaṇa sings).

Once upon a time, another forest: a forest of cedars (devadāru, wood of the gods, Cedrus deodara), into which Bhikṣāṭana Śiva, the mendicant, wanders naked, deep in despair for the sin of having killed Brahmā, his outheld palm an escutcheon, Brahmā’s skull still stuck to it somewhat like an alms bowl. The illustrious sages in the forest are not pleased to see this beautiful beggar who drives their women mad with desire. They send a tiger to shred him to bits; he flays the tiger and wears its bloody skin around his waist. They throw venomous serpents at him; he wraps them around himself as sinuous ornaments. They send a demon dwarf, the malign Muyalaka. Śiva steps on him and breaks his back. And then he dances. He dances until it dawns on them that he is none other than Śiva. 

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What’s New in Translation: April 2023

New translations from the French, Swahili, and Polish!

This month, we are taking a look at works from world literature that unveil the universal intersections at the centre of society: an empathetic interrogation into the cross-section of contemporary life in a superstore by the inimitable Annie Ernaux; a brilliantly curated selection of humanist stories from the Swahili; and a subtle, delicate look into the nature of happiness as written into dialogue by lauded Polish author, Marek Bieńczyk. Read on to find out more!

look at lights

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, Yale University Press, 2023

Review by Laurel Taylor, Assistant Editor

Even at its best, ethnography is an ethically tricky subject; at its worst, it can dehumanize, tokenize, and Other the people who fall under its burning eye—an eye so often situated in wealth, power, whiteness, and patriarchy. Annie Ernaux is all too aware of the treacherous ethnographic ground she walks in Regarde les lumières mon amour, originally published in 2014 and translated now into an incisive and unadorned English by Alison L. Strayer as Look at the Lights, My Love. In this brief but gripping nonfiction entry, Ernaux records her various visits to the French big-box store Auchan from November 2012 to October 2013, a period which happens to coincide with the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in the Savar sub-district of Dhaka, Bangladesh. 

For all its drab ubiquity and late-capitalist imbrication, Ernaux treats the site of the superstore not only as a place perpetuating a unilateral and devastating economics (in the broadest sense of the word), but also one which engages humanity in complex ways—affectively, socially, temporally.

. . . when you think of it, there is no other space, public or private, where so many individuals so different in terms of age, income, education, geographic and ethnic background, and personal style, move about and rub shoulders with each other. No enclosed space where people are brought into greater contact with their fellow humans, dozens of times a year, and where each has a chance to catch a glimpse of others’ ways of living and being. Politicians, journalists, “experts,” all those who have never set foot in a superstore, do not know the social reality of France today.

Indeed, it feels almost taboo in the often inward-facing world of Parisian literature to engage with something so blasé as a big-box store. At one point, Ernaux even says in an aside, “I don’t see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, or Françoise Sagan doing their shopping in a superstore; Georges Perec yes, but I may be wrong about that.” For me, this is what makes Ernaux’s earnest attempt at engagement all the more relevant (and close-to-home, as I grew up in a squarely middle-class family that did most of its shopping at a big-box store). In addition to the unconventional topic, this particular book also feels difficult to classify. Neither journalism nor something so structured as a dialectic, Look at the Lights, My Love is something more akin to mindfulness. It is an attempt to deliberately undo the asynchronous pace of the superstore—a place where flash sales, labyrinthine design, ever-changing displays, and the press of daily chores all collude to entrap and entangle us in the past, present, and future all at once. Ernaux’s thick descriptions, in trying to circumvent these snares, work to better provide us with “[a] free statement of observations and sensations, aimed at capturing something of the life of the place.”

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We Can All Be Walking Poets: Sauntering Verse and Dada

“Walking artists walk to create something. So actually, you could argue that you are the walking artist.”

Sauntering Verse, a new app for auto-generated poetry, uses Dadaist language to redefine the experience of physical space. In this essay, Lara Norgaard tests the app while reflecting on its implications for our relationship with technology, and the art that it creates. What contexts do we bring to the art we create and consume? What does it mean to be an artist when art is made possible just by taking your phone on a walk?

It is warm and cloudy on the afternoon following the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. The extreme right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro received just over 46% of the popular vote—he would come to win the run-off election just weeks later. It feels like the world I woke up to earlier that morning was not precisely my own, as if a body-snatcher stole my world instead of my skin.

The day is a blur: I walk a few meters from the living room to the kitchen in my apartment. Outside the window, the skyline of nearly identical high-rises in the Brazilian city that I call home glint in clouded sadness, weighed down by more than 186 thousand people who voted for a man whom The New Yorker has called a cross between Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte. Perhaps he will not win in the second round, but perhaps what is already bad will get worse. This eventuality feels so surreal that I focus on boiling water for a calming mug of coffee. I glance down at my phone. It wrote me a poem:

She skipped it

A rear Jesus

They of them

The sagging can retract or sagging sagging

A quirky staging

She pots him

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Translation Tuesday: “English Lessons” by Mónica Lavín

"Stepping into the United States was stepping into order and cleanliness, Patricia always thought."

This Tuesday brings us a story that straddles the US-Mexico border. In Mónica Lavín’s “English Lessons,” a Mexican woman travels to San Diego for an all-too-brief reunion with her brother. Her notions of America, a “better world” glimpsed in the Dick and Jane stories from her childhood, are upended in an unexpected, heartrending manner. 

For more great short works like this, check out the fiction section and special Korean literature feature in the Spring 2018 issue of Asymptote.

English Lessons

Stepping into the United States was stepping into order and cleanliness, Patricia always thought. A sense of well-being settled in her chest when she crossed the border. It was like entering a story, a fiction, proof that a better world existed. Like the world her first grade English books had shown: the house with a garden, the family with a dog named Spot and a cat called Puff. Sally, Dick and Jane played with a “red wagon.”  “Red” was rojo, “wagon” carretilla? She’d never seen one except in the color illustrations of those books. The mother called them in to dinner, with her styled hair, her big smile and an apron over her full-skirted dress. Not that Patricia wasn’t critical of many things about the gringo lifestyle—their detachment from family life and excessive practicality, their sense of being the center of the world. But in her experience, U.S. highways had no potholes, there were fewer rattletrap cars, and San Diego’s landscaped roundabouts were a pleasure to see. She suspected her idea was childish, so it was a conception she didn’t dare confess. Certainly, after standing in the tedious line, and feeling like a convict when the guard took her papers and examined her, knowing she was safely “on the other side” made her breathe more calmly. She anticipated enjoying this trip especially because she’d visit her friend Laura in California, and her brother Daniel was also coming to San Diego for two days. They hadn’t planned it, but it was a happy coincidence. He lived in Guadalajara, further from the border, loved and knew San Diego. He’d promised to take her for a drink at the Hyatt at sundown to see the bay. And she would accompany him on his mission to buy household goods: sheets, towels, kitchen things, placemats for his bachelor breakfast table. She liked his attitude, how he was determined to make a pleasant abode for himself, treating it as a new project to be enthusiastic about, instead of being depressed by his divorce.

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Spectacle Shopping

"They will wear the product and talk about it (and to it) incessantly. They will buy another one next year."

Black Friday is not only a chaotic holiday for shoppers, but it is also an extremely exciting time for those in the media to represent the spectacle of this chaos to the public. The public then consumes this content at face-value, continuing the chaos online and in their homes. In light of Black Friday’s “festivities,” Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle shone out to me as a great way to explain it. It’s not really a phenomenon, but an obsession in a society that perhaps values the commodity more than other areas. This personal essay explores the parallels I have seen between Black Friday and Guy Debord’s writing.

All citations are from Guy Debord in his work La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967). Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

***

“The world the spectacle holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce.”

I’m a Search Engine Optimization Specialist in French and in English for a marketing company in Detroit. I like to say that I fix the Internet for a living, while getting to implement my French Literature degree. The reality is that I put the right words in the right places, and if the search engine algorithms take kindly to them, these words will rank better on Google. I describe it to my college advisor as, “writing French and English prose poems about the Chevrolet Silverado.”

I celebrate my anniversary at the company in November. My manager congratulates me. She was worried I wouldn’t make it this long, away from my family and friends in New York, in a field that isn’t as creative as one might hope. (Conversations with my manager include, “No Allegra, you can’t say that the Chevrolet Malibu is ‘making waves in Ottawa.’ I don’t think Canadians even know what Malibu Beach is.”) READ MORE…