L'Inde sans Cashmere

I saw this once a couple of years back, and again this week: a map of India on France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast, with the disputed (but largely, and longly Indian-administered) state of Jammu and Kashmir omitted. More than a little odd-looking. Is this obvious cartographic siding with Pakistan a sort of French payback for the loss of their colony at Pondicherry?

Music Notes

Though I've already posted on M.I.A., her second album, Kala, is out this week, complete with a wonderful Mobutu-print-inspired cover. She did a lovely live session at KCRW a couple weeks back — I was beside myself when she launched the first song, "Bamboo Banger" with a half-cover of Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" (though omitting the part about driving to the Stop-N-Shop). I also loved a line from her second song, "Hussel", that went more or less, "I put people on the map / who've never seen a map". And I can't tell whether her off-pitch singing is a sort of casual swagger or an homage to the semitonal wonders of South Asian (and particularly South South Asian) singing styles. Probably both.

Rounding out music news: Josh Ritter has a new album, e'en edgier than the last but sounding quite good from what I've heard. I'll have to get it sometime.

And two recent indie-rock discoveries: Vampire Weekend (think Paul Simon's Graceland with a punk-pop sensibility), and Bishop Allen (I heard their song "Castanets" on the KEXP podcast and thought, "wow, what a great song!"; then looked up the band name and thought, "wow, they're named after one of my favorite-named Cambridge, MA streets!", then looked at who was in it and thought, "wow, I used to work in the same office as the lead singer! we used to nod hello!").

The Mississippi Line

In one of Walker Percy's novels (Lancelot, I'm pretty sure), the narrator mentions a 19th century duel that was fought on an island in the Mississippi river so as to be outside the jurisdiction of any state. The theme resurfaces later on in one of the meant-to-provoke questions in Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: Why didn't anyone ever write a novel about rafting down the Hudson River? The answer, if any, has to do with the statelessness of a border-river: you're neither in one place or the other, passing by without necessarily entering.

Of course, no islands in the Mississippi are truly without jurisdiction—there's always a dotted line on some map. But the current dotted line's often quite fascinating. Below's a particularly jigsawed stretch south of Vicksburg. Some of the jogs are reminders that rivers change course from time to time (hence too the beautiful-from-above filigree of oxbow lakes). But I'm not sure the dotted line always follows a former river-course either.