توماس
توماس واقعا یه دایره المعارف متحرکه. این پسر انقده عمیق فکر می کنه و انقده معلومات داره که آدم همیشه پیشش تبدیل میشه به یه دانش آموز و ترجیح میده فقط گوش بده.
ریشه های آنتی سمیتیزم و مکانیسم دفاعی که باعث ظهور نژادپرستی افراطی بین گروه‌های اقلیت میشه یکی از موضوعات جالبی بود که امروز بحثش شد. باید بیشتر ببینمش.
دانشجوی ایرانی
ایمیل می زنه می پرسه:
این رزومه رو ببین، انقده از اسم تو خیر دیدم که می خوام شانسم رو با این یکی هم اسمت هم امتحان کنم. ولی یه چیزی اذیتم می کنه:چرا این همه ایرانی کاردرست کشورشون رو ترک می کنن. آیا این با رفتاری که حکومت داره ارتباط داره؟ وقتی ما (کاناداییها) بهشون فرصت اومدن می دیم ضربه‌ی درازمدتی به ایران نمی زنیم؟
خوشحالم که این همه بزرگواره. بعد از دو روز بهش ایمیل می زنم. نظرم رو راجع به رزومه می گم و بعد می گم:
نتونستم جواب خوبی واست پیدا کنم. بازم فکر می کنم شاید بتونم جوابی بدم. ولی الان می تونم این رو بهت بگم که نه! اگه کسی ضربه ای می زنه تو نیستی. تنها چیزی که می تونم بهت بگم اینه که اگه این طرفت از ایران بورس داشت نگیرش. خیلی از ایرانیایی که الان دور و ورت می بینی که تو دانشگاه استاد شدن کثافت هایی بودن که با دورویی اعتماد حکومت و سیستم رو جلب کردن که بیان، پولشون رو گرفتن، زندگیشون رو اینجا روبراه کردن وبعد یه بیلاخ دادن به کشور و برنگشتن.
می گه:
ممنونم از کمکت، حتما می پرسم که بورس دولتی نداشته باشه.
Fairy Tale
After our first discussion of Lolita, I went to bed excited, thinking about Mitra's question. Why did Lolita or Madame Bovary fill us with so much joy? Was there something wrong with these novels, or with us?-were Flaubert and Nabokov unfeeling brutes? By the next Thursday, I had formulated my thoughts and could not wait to share them with the class.
Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it. Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. This is why we love Madame Bovary and cry for Emma, why we greedily read Lolita as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Illegal Dream
Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away. In one, perhaps my own, the dreamer wanted to run but she couldn't: she was rooted to the ground, right outside her front door. She could not turn around, open the door and hide inside. The only one among us who claimed she had never experienced such fear was Nassrin. "I was always afraid of having to lie. You know what they say: to thine own self be true and all that. I believed in that sort of thing," she said with a shrug. "But I have improved," she added as an afterthought. Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams.
In Invitation to a Beheading, on the wall of Cincinnatus C.'s jail, which is decorated like a third-rate hotel, there are certain instructions for the prisoners, such as: "A prisoner's meekness is a prison's pride." Rule number six, one that lies at the heart of the novel, is: "It is desirable that the inmate should not have dreams at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose context might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape." .
Reading Lolita in Tehran
راز
می خوام یه رازی رو بهت بگم. از جایی فهمیدم که یه دنیایی خیلی بزرگتر از دنیایی که تا حالا شناختم منتظرمه که کشفش کنم. دنیایی که فقط با این هدف ساخته شده. وقت زیادی ندارم، حتی یه لحظه رو هم نمیشه تامل کرد.
Montana's Beef Short Ribs
حیفم اومد از Beef Short Ribs که دیشب تو Montana's خوردیم ننویسم. لامصب خیلی خوشمزه بود خصوصا باربیکیو سسش که سیب - کارامل بود عالیش کرده بود. البته Montana's همیشه خوبه.
Invention of Lying - Shaw on Demand
رامین فیلم رو تو هواپیما دیده بود و اصرار داشت من هم ببینمش. علیرغم سادگی و کم خرجی فیلم قشنگی بود که چند تا موضوع مهم رو خیلی خوب و صریح به نقد کشیده بود. اگه رو فیلمنامه پرداخت بیشتری می شد می تونست خیلی بهتر شه.
Invitation to a Beheading
The world of the novel is one of empty rituals. Every act is bereft of substance and significance, and even death becomes a spectacle for which the good citizens buy tickets. It is only through these empty rituals that brutality becomes possible. In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality. Nabokov had a special Russian term for this: poshlust.
Poshlust, Nabokov explains, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive." Yes, there are many examples you can bring from everyday life, from the politicians' sugary speeches to certain writers' proclamations to chickens. Chickens? You know, the ones the street vendors sell nowadays-if you lived in Tehran, you couldn't possibly miss them. The ones they dip in paint-shocking pink, brilliant red or turquoise blue-in order to make them more attractive. Or the plastic flowers, the bright pink-and-blue artificial gladiolas carted out at the university both for mourning and for celebration.
What Nabokov creates for us in Invitation to a Beheading is not the actual physical pain and torture of a totalitarian regime but the nightmarish quality of living in an atmosphere of perpetual dread. Cincinnatus C. is frail, he is passive, he is a hero without knowing or acknowledging it: he fights with his instincts, and his acts of writing are his means of escape. He is a hero because he refuses to become like all the rest.
Unlike in other utopian novels, the forces of evil here are not omnipotent; Nabokov shows us their frailty as well. They are ridiculous and they can be defeated, and this does not lessen the tragedy-the waste. Invitation to a Beheading is written from the point of view of the victim, one who ultimately sees the absurd sham of his persecutors and who must retreat into himself in order to survive.
Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the cruelty to which we were subjected. We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive. We also instinctively recognized poshlust-not just in others, but in ourselves. This was one reason that art and literature became so essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity. What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner.
We formed a special bond with Nabokov despite the difficulty of his prose. This went deeper than our identification with his themes. His novels are shaped around invisible trapdoors, sudden gaps that constantly pull the carpet from under the reader's feet. They are filled with mistrust of what we call everyday reality, an acute sense of that reality's fickleness and frailty. There was something, both in his fiction and in his life, that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away. I think that was what drove me to create the class. My main link with the outside world had been the university, and now that I had severed that link, there on the brink of the void, I could invent the violin or be devoured by the void.
Reading Lolita in Tehran