And thus descended the trolls

In his farewell speech, President Eisenhower spoke of a military-industrial complex, a shapeless entity that he thought would come to dominate the political field in coming years. I am going to talk about a controversy complex, a vibrant, often creative side industry that merrily springs up around a major controversy, and disappears almost immediately afterwords - like an ephemeral moment of joy.

Like vultures feasting on a carcass, trolls, hackers, and general internet lowlifes have gleefully descended on the facebook page of our dear chancellor. Taking full advantage of the anarchy and reigning chaos, these greedy opportunists have swamped the wall with senseless rants, (hopefully) intentional bad grammar, and quasi-existential non sequiturs.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the finest specimen, the sultan of trolldom:

At least he is honest about his, ahem, movie choices

In such a perfidious and noxious environment, can the Emperor Palpatine stay behind?

Come to the dark side

And very recently, some fellow called Charles Edward Shumar IV (and nowwwwww presenting, his royal highness) has been posting this verbose message on every single post: ( I suspect he is using a bot)

Oh for the days when I went to UCLA and cell phones were just a tech-geek's fevered dream. Now, is there any chance at all Ms. Wallace knew what she was doing and is angling to get a reality show? Or an invite from Charlie Sheen to be one of his new "goddesses" over at Sober Valley Lodge?

Well played, "entrepreneurs" of this dubious side industry.

Update on the Asians in library rant

Wow. This issue has taken on some epic proportions. When I first found out about the Youtube rant by a female UCLA student yesterday, I thought it would be contained within UCLA. But this morning, I woke up to posts about this incident plastered all over the internet, in places as diverse and distinct as twitter feeds, news blogs and message boards. Even the tabloids took a stab at it. To my utter amazement, she even made it across the pond, where the Daily Mail wrote up a blurb about it. Move over, Charlie Sheen.

Meanwhile at UCLA, hundreds of students clogged up chancellor Gene Block's official facebook page with comments and long-winded opinion pages. Although many comments got pretty out of hand and some students took the opportunity to troll around and have some perverse fun, most were pretty much on track.

After hours of waiting, the good chancellor finally released an official statement about the incident, both via an email and through his facebook page:

To the Campus Community:

I am appalled by the thoughtless and hurtful comments of a UCLA student posted on YouTube. Like many of you, I recoil when someone invokes the right of free expression to demean other individuals or groups.
This one act certainly does not represent the views of our UCLA community. Our community is built on mutual respect and civility, and we are committed to fostering an environment that values and supports every member of the community. It is most unfortunate that a single clip on the Internet undermines that environment by expressing hurtful and shameful ideas about others in our community. I believe that speech that expresses intolerance toward any group of people on the basis of race or gender, or sexual, religious or cultural identity is indefensible and has no place at UCLA.
Let this incident serve as a reminder of our collective responsibility to confront hateful and ignorant speech and to uphold UCLA’s core values of respect and integrity.
Sincerely,
Gene D. Block
Chancellor


A very eloquent, appropriate and tactful message by the Chancellor. 

Some enterprising soul has capitalized this opportunity to sell t-shirts. The website claims it will donate all profits to the tsunami victims in Japan.

 
 

Asians in the library? How dare they!

A remarkable youtube video has been circulating today, and it has kicked up a veritable shitstorm. The video features a female UCLA student ranting about how "hordes of Asians" living and studying around her need to learn "American manners" like how to fend for themselves and how not to talk loudly in the library. Among other things, she mentions how she is tired of seeing families of these students flock to their apartments every weekend to cook, wash clothes and help around. Yes, how unusual of families to want to visit their kids?

But that's not her main offense. Midway through the rant, she starts complaining about how these hordes have no respect for proper library etiquette. She does a crude imitation of a generic "Asian" accent.
 
The original copy of the video got deleted but by now there are duplicate copies floating around:


Naturally, the enraged mobs are out on the streets vilifying her as a racist. I don't know if this is necessarily racist (IMO, the word racist/racism - both of which carry very heavy connotations, are woefully overused and abused in our society), but it is bewilderingly crude, offensive and ignorant.

Too much to ask: a faint damnation of finals week

Finals week oh finals week

You make us so weak with your heartless streak

Is it too much to ask to spare us once?

End of every quarter

A span that is ten weeks long

You are here before too long

Flashing in front our eyes without fail

Your remarkable periodicity makes me frail

Is it too much to ask to spare us once?

End of every quarter

Undergrads crowd libraries 

To worship your many vagaries

In quiet desperation we persevere

Always hoping you won't be too severe

Is it too much to ask to spare us once?

And although there is light at the end of this plight

We wait in the dark too damn long

Really

Is it too much to ask to spare us just once?

Pardon my contorted plan to make the verses rhyme. There is only so much time to goof around.

Saturday song

As we all prepare to plunge an hour ahead, enjoy this killer of a song by Arcade Fire:



Trust me, you will doing yourself a solid favor by listening to it. Guaranteed to take you through all your terrifyingly arduous finals (even the gorier ones).

It's Friday night so treat yourself...

...to this great jazz piece, the concluding track on John Coltrane's magnum opus A love supreme.

The curious malady of the modern novel

I am currently reading Snow , by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Written in 2002, it paints a very nuanced and detailed picture of modern Turkey and its problems, particularly the schism between conservative Muslims and the more western-learning republicans. The ostensible plot is this: Ka, a minor Turkish poet, returns from a 12-year exile in Germany to Istanbul and sets off to the border town of Kars to cover the alarming rise of suicide rates among young women. These women had recently been condemned by various outlets (government officials, school officials, family, media etc.) because they heeded the call of conservative Muslims and began wearing head scarves. I won't go into too much detail about the story because that's not what I want to discuss here.

Snow has flashes of utter, overwhelming brilliance, which are unfortunately punctuated by periods of unbearable stupor. And this seems to plague a lot of modern/postmodern novels. The authors tend to get tangled up in their own web of symbolism, meta-narratives, and abstractions. They lose focus and as result, the novel tends to lag. Now I don't mean the novel lacks "excitement" or a "binding plot." I have read plenty of things where nothing seems to happen for long stretches of time (Lampedusa's Leopard comes to mind) but still manage to provide a very enjoyable reading experience.

Haruki Murakami's Wind-up bird chronicle, a 600-something page behemoth is a classic example of this. A very mundane event opens this long, twisted, exhilarating novel: the protagonist Toru and his wife Kumiko become concerned when their cat disappears. As Toru begins the search for this cat, bizarre things start happening in his life. The rest of the plot is too convoluted for me to describe here, but suffice it to say it includes weird dream sequences, a mysterious mother-son duo who claims to cure people of unspecified problems by touching them, a gruesome detour into the forgotten Russo-Japanese conflict along the Manchukuo border right before WWII started (a man gets skinned alive), and a disturbingly blase 16-year old who works in a dreary factory and spends her free time thinking the duck people talk to her.

There are parts where the novel becomes very frustrating. It just bogs down. It's like Murakami got himself stuck in a quagmire and had to figure his way out. Emotionally draining novel. I think Murakami could have slashed 150 pages easily and still conveyed the same message and tone.

At the same time, I can't stop reading post-modern stuff. The flashes of brilliance abso-frickin-lutely make it worth reading the whole novel. They are so good at giving a glimpse into the complex thought process of their respective authors that they more than make up for the dreadful lags in the middle.