Signs Preceding Sexual Harassment

I’ve been to Tokyo twice. Most people know about the wild public transport issues they have on the subway – the harassment, the people whose job it is to shove as meany people as possible into a single train car, etc. Having been on a Tokyo subway during rush hour… It’s a nightmare for someone that’s worried about misunderstandings. Sometimes I got crammed between two or more very polite Japanese women and have no choice but to smell their hair. (I’m roughly four inches taller than the average Japanese woman, so my nose is right at scalp height when standing straight up)

Where am I going with this? I have a very specific issue with a single scene in Signs Preceding the End of the World. I’m sure I’m taking this too seriously, but there’s a part in the book where a coyote is helping Makina across a river on her way to Texas, and the narrative goes out of it’s way to show that he appears disinterested in her, which is interesting since every other male character so far seems ready to jump her bones with a second’s notice. Yet, while they’re rowing across, Makina notices him smell her hair. Just thinking about this…. If she’s on a back stroke while he’s on a front stroke with the oars, wouldn’t he be more or less forced to inhale while she was leaning back (depending on his breathing rhythm)?

Now I’ve polled a few people that I assume are female, and they’ve informed me that this kind of thing isn’t uncommon, it is very noticeable, and it is “totally gross,” but I really don’t know what to think of it. Did he do it on purpose? Why? Did he like what Makina smelled like? Does it matter?

I can’t even begin to answer these questions because I can’t even fathom why someone would smell another person’s hair. I think I’ve only ever done it on purpose when my girlfriend asked me if I liked the new conditioner she got. It was pretty good, kind of like a melon smell but better because it was coming from a woman I love.

I guess my point is that there are certain aspects of the novel that I can’t even begin to understand, principally the female experience. I’ve been to gay bars and been objectified and hit on in ways that made me super uncomfortable and had people touch me without my consent, I’ve had coworkers at work make weird advances on me or hit on me or touch me, but as a man it’s a much different experience with different types of weirdness and different feelings of conflict. And even when it’s directly happening to me, I’m not really “tuned in” to it like Makina is in the novel.

I’ll end with this: is it even worthwhile for someone like me to try to understand this aspect of the novel? Or will I always be fumbling trying to deconstruct an alien experience from a perspective totally divorced from my own ego? I’ve always felt constrained in these respects as a man, and I want to understand these aspects of life in a way that doesn’t make me feel like Ice T on Law and Order SVU.

Utopia Review (Not Spoiler Free)

Utopia is a 2010 science fiction novel from the late Ahmed Khaled Tawfik. Despite the name, it is a dystopian novel (Think 1984 or Brave New World) and is ostensibly written with an Egyptian audience in mind, but we’ll get back to that.

Taking place in the 2020s in an Egypt in a world where the energy crisis has been solved by some sort of bio fuel, the country has devolved into a perfect Marxist shitshow. We find the one percenters hiding out in walled cities on the coast (complete with amoral military industrial complex contractors from America protecting them) while the “others” live in obscene abject poverty with no rights or legal standing. It’s only natural that we follow two first person narrators throughout the story, one from each class.

Our one percenter is fittingly characterized as essentially a teenage Norman Bateman (he gives the fake name “Alaa” at one point), where as the proletariat hero is a dead ringer for a crippled Holden Caulfield; Martyr complex and weird sister relationships and all (Gaber).

If you don’t know what a one percenter is, I’ve included a video, skip to 1:00 for the most obvious example of what it’s like to be at the top of the food chain. This is also something the narrator literally does in the novel, but with a Lamborghini.

Interestingly, the novel doesn’t wrestle with the nature of the technologies that have changed the world of the book, but instead focuses on the characters and society that arises when the entire oil market drops out of existence. Other than a few awkward exposition dumps (maybe they are more seamless in Arabic, I wouldn’t know) the book keeps the audience inside of either an unrepentant rapist, or a guy who spends most of the novel deciding whether or not he should be a rapist, eventually deciding to take the relative moral high ground of not raping someone, but not until after manipulating and drugging his would be victim while having her as guest. I tend to like stories that force the audience to empathize with terrible people – let me tell you about Skippy Dies or Falling Down sometime – but I’m not sure it worked as intended here since I ended up sympathizing more with the asshole to kills and rapes people willy more so than Gaber. The interesting parts of Gaber are the parts where he has a mirrored psychology of Alaa, and the question at the end of the novel where its unclear who really got the upper hand of the other, even though one of them lies dead at the hands of the other.

But is the book any good? Well, sort of.

Remember when I said the book was for Egyptians? Well, while it was originally written in Arabic, the novel features a lot of motifs and imagery that will be familiar to American readers; in fact, the opening page of the novel is more or less of a rumination on the scene from Platoon. You know, this one:

So it’s absolutely accessible to a “western” reader, since most of the more “Arab” motifs and phrases are either self evident, or helpfully explained in detail. Not that you’ll be able to get a copy, since the book is out of print and all of the used copies are suspiciously expensive on amazon (Fifty bucks for a book that’s less than two hundred pages? No thanks).

Having said all that, if you’ve read or seen all of the sources the book alludes to (Mask of the Red Death among others) you’ve probably read Animal Farm, which without spoiling too much, might make you feel really cynical about the implied ending of the novel. I think the final act of the book is very interesting, but it feels somewhat disconnected from the rest of the book: like a dream takes over the story and all of the implications and metaphors and abstractions in the story take physical shape and rip the continuity apart. This might feel really cool and interesting to a different reader, but it feels somewhat rushed and forced to this reader

However, I have to recommend the book. It’s just too weird and dark to not give a shot. I could tell you it’s just Brave New World with the Savage being from the higher class, but its still more interesting than that. Even if the story feels like a bit of a train wreck for you, the characters and conflicts will likely stay with you and stimulate your mind.

I give Utopia a Cloud Atlas out of ten.

 

19 Ways, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the translation

Never mind the title, I actually want to talk about Franz Kafka. Hear me out, I found the article (Paper? Critical essay? Short analytical work?) very useful and interesting as a primer for the difficulties or complications in “translation”. It does however do so by perhaps showing the most extreme example possible – that being translating long lost ancient Chinese landscape poetry into English, Spanish and French. I thought about the different ways to introduce the class to the question of what translation is and thought about the many attempts to translate Kafka’s work out of German.

This is where I’d like to make some conjectures: In general, I think we can assume that its easier to translate a short story or novel in German into English than Wei’s ancient poem into English, at least in the idea of keeping both the “meaning” and the “feeling” without compromising to each other. After all, English heavily borrows from German for vocabulary and most of its grammar conventions, right?

This is very general, but the truth of the matter is that Kafka’s works are amazingly complicated and weird to read in English. The first time I picked up “The Trial” I felt literally disoriented by the laize faire grammar and what I perceived as childish narration. After a while I got used to it, but it still felt like I was still reading a different language, and I didn’t read the translator notes because I’m a buffoon. I’ve since come to the conclusion that the work intentionally attempts to make you feel lost in the act of reading, making amazingly long sentences where its uneasy to find the true verb or object or subject, just like K how cannot find reason or humanity while trust within a conspiracy with no clear objective or reason in the story.

I didn’t get to far in the novel (neither did Kafka – he died before finishing it), but while taking a German one class later in life I learned that German grammar has a few very interesting grammatical freedoms that English doesn’t have: principly that German can the object and subject of a sentence be switched around and put anywhere in a sentence with simply context (or using the genative/dative cases to indicate object verb relations) providing the correct interpretation. For example “The man bit the dog” in German would actually make sense and not being insane and weird. Don’t ask me to explain any more because I got a C in the class so I’m straining to even remember this much.

So what does this mean? It means that Kafka, in German was able to write sentence of very vague meaning that is very difficult to translate into English where ambiguity is bereft. And this is simply in the basic sentence structure of the language; Kafka also made use of the subordinate clause in a way that would be unthinkable in english, creating complex sentences where the verb of the whole sentence is at the end of the sentence, which might be over a whole page long. This requires translators to break English convention or work around the language to create the intended effect and make a patchwork prose that’s only slightly easier to read than “Finnegan’s Wake.”

I thought about these individual problems in Kafka and German a lot as we spoke about the sliding scale between fidelity and transformation (or Metamorphosis?). I thought that maybe the class would get an idea that works in closely related European languages that would theoretically have a translation that look more like a transliteration, but I think the reality is that all translations are sacrificial.

On a side note, I actually think that the best translation of “The Trial” is it’s graphic novel adaptation from David Zane Mairowitz. Granted, I’m biased toward the genre, but it feels like a very rich work – part Maus, part MC Escher, all Kafka.