Have spent the past week or so in Bangalore. I was of course supposed to arrive here much earlier (the previous Tuesday, as a m.o.f.), but flight delays and uncooperative ticket agents conspired to ensure a protracted and rather harrowing journey. In fact, it is about the events surrounding the journey that this post is about.
Or perhaps not. To tell stories at this point would be anticlimactic; after all, we have come through, we have shone. The consternation that engulfed us when confronted with oppression has departed, leaving in its place a feeble impression of victory over circumstances, and a mistaken conflation of action with result. We have come apart at the seams and then reified ourselves, we cry. Is not this after all proof that we are masters of our own pliable destinies? That we can hold in submission, through assiduity and willpower, the selfsame ties that appear to bind us? Surely the transpiration of such a sequence of testing events with a satisfying, protagonist-affirming conclusion will show to any healthy skeptic the irrefutable proof of the non-existence of God, or even god; we need no divine mediation to perpetuate ourselves through our fraught existences. Our egos will suff--
I'm sorry about my friend. He looks like a philosopher. I remember in school when he used to win arguments with people by flooding them with big-big sentence constructions. Bored me like anything. See even here he is showing his stunts without telling what he is talking about. Anyway leave him. The story goes like this -- I was supposed to leave Austin on a Sunday morning, but the travel agent was not available on Sundays, and Sri Lankan airlines was also....no, wait...I went to the airport and that ticket-agent-wallah was so rude! He told me I had no reservation and then I had to call my uncle and then my mobile phone was going out of charge -- actually that was later, no? -- yeah, correct -- So first I --
Dude. Seriously. That was stupid. The problem with him is that he's just not with it, you know? I mean, seriously, who adds 'no' at the end of questions? That is so 20th century. Anyway at Chicago airport there was this totally cute chick with this lame dude. I mean, literally lame! He was going around on one of those gross wheelchairs and looked like fucking Stephen Hawking, man. They went in to one of those handicapped bathrooms. I bet they totally did it in there. I'd pretend be handicapped too if it gets me a d-cup. Anyway so there was this Chinese dude who was right next to me asking me if I was on the Frankfurt flight too. Like I'd tell him! What if he flicks my passport or something! Whatever. The ticket-agent chick was so ugh I went like call 911! We need an emergency plastic surgery! She was like so staring right at me ---
Please stop. You are nauseating me. Please ignore my friends above. They don't really mean anything they --
Friday, December 21, 2007
Friday, December 7, 2007
Bathos
How devoid life is of the climaxes that one observes elsewhere.
Today I taught my last class for the semester. I was of course acutely aware that this was to be my 'last class' this year, and my 'last day' with this particular batch of students; so aware, in fact, that it led to a certain perverse brand of self-consciousness that lent an imaginary gravity to the occasion, and assigned to it a wholly superfluous sentimentality. I thought to myself -- surely there will be some token event that will signal this occasion, some little flag that will unfurl to reveal a hidden significance. Surely my students will feel, much as I do, an enveloping melancholy that qualifies their joy at leaving the semester behind. Surely they are as affected by this as I am.
What happened, of course, contradicted everything I had hoped for. I was late to class for reasons that I could not have predicted, and some students -- who had perhaps decided that this last session need not be taken seriously -- had already settled down low in their chairs in an attitude of weariness. My entry to the classroom was met by an almost unanimous sigh of disapproval, and my subsequent efforts to revivify them were countered by an abiding passivity that proved nevertheless to be quite oppressive. The session had acquired an involuntary aspect of gloom, and I was needless to say quite affected by it myself; so much so that I ended it in (mostly dissembled) frustration about a half-hour later. My excitement and nascent self-consciousness had dissipated and was replaced by something much more diffident and perhaps also ineffable. There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to understand the source of one's frustration.
It is just as well. Imagine if the entire class had exploded, much as I had hoped they would, in a simultaneous expression of faux sentimentality; if they had given me a card, perhaps, or sung me a song. I would certainly have not been able to bear the embarrassment. (How fortunate we are that we can abominate in others qualities that we ourselves possess; how lost we would be without this irreplaceable talent.) That they had no desire to do these things leaves me a little doleful, but on the other hand the manufactured heaviness of the past few days is gone. Climaxes are on the whole better left to the imagination.
Today I taught my last class for the semester. I was of course acutely aware that this was to be my 'last class' this year, and my 'last day' with this particular batch of students; so aware, in fact, that it led to a certain perverse brand of self-consciousness that lent an imaginary gravity to the occasion, and assigned to it a wholly superfluous sentimentality. I thought to myself -- surely there will be some token event that will signal this occasion, some little flag that will unfurl to reveal a hidden significance. Surely my students will feel, much as I do, an enveloping melancholy that qualifies their joy at leaving the semester behind. Surely they are as affected by this as I am.
What happened, of course, contradicted everything I had hoped for. I was late to class for reasons that I could not have predicted, and some students -- who had perhaps decided that this last session need not be taken seriously -- had already settled down low in their chairs in an attitude of weariness. My entry to the classroom was met by an almost unanimous sigh of disapproval, and my subsequent efforts to revivify them were countered by an abiding passivity that proved nevertheless to be quite oppressive. The session had acquired an involuntary aspect of gloom, and I was needless to say quite affected by it myself; so much so that I ended it in (mostly dissembled) frustration about a half-hour later. My excitement and nascent self-consciousness had dissipated and was replaced by something much more diffident and perhaps also ineffable. There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to understand the source of one's frustration.
It is just as well. Imagine if the entire class had exploded, much as I had hoped they would, in a simultaneous expression of faux sentimentality; if they had given me a card, perhaps, or sung me a song. I would certainly have not been able to bear the embarrassment. (How fortunate we are that we can abominate in others qualities that we ourselves possess; how lost we would be without this irreplaceable talent.) That they had no desire to do these things leaves me a little doleful, but on the other hand the manufactured heaviness of the past few days is gone. Climaxes are on the whole better left to the imagination.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Daily dose of voyeurism
Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside
The article explains the plight of one Jeffrey Deskovic, wrongly convicted of a rape and killing sixteen years ago. Mr. Deskovic was exonerated through DNA evidence in 2006.
There is a story here, but not one that can be told in the column inches of a newspaper, and especially not one that resorts to cheap stunts to heighten the reader's emotional response while quietly manipulating him.
For example, the first lines --
See how easily Mr. Deskovic's complex emotional response is condensed for public consumption? He was a swimmer, readers, and now, in jail, he can only imagine swimming! Isn't that sad? Don't you feel for him, reader?
Some later lines --
Yes, can you imagine, reader? You, who take these things for granted, the knotting of ties, the attending of funerals, the making of love? Don't you feel for him?
No, you don't. Because the article depends on gawking at the man and taking an almost vindictive pleasure in enumerating his sorrows, the only thing it extracts from the reader is a reaction of pity. No attempt is made to portray Mr. Deskovic as a real human being; he is made out instead to be a degraded showpiece, losing all dignity in the face of this caricaturing of his life.
The New York Times is far from the only medium culpable; in fact, it seems that most American media is preoccupied with trying to peer into people's personal lives. Fox News, for example, uses its prime-time news broadcasts mainly to discuss rapes and murders of beautiful young women. TLC (The Learning Channel) ensures increased viewership by broadcasting graphic images of morbidly obese men and women undergoing medical treatment. Larry King and his ilk conduct celebrity interviews that reveal their subjects' personal lives in lurid detail. And so on.
To deplore this sort of relentless voyeurism, though, is misguided. We are all of us despicable in our own separate ways; who cannot claim to derive pleasure from another's pain? Which one among us is so enlightened that the fall of a famous personality does not cheer us in some undefinable way? If empathy is a human trait, then so is condescension. We can hope to preserve some sense of self-superiority by such contrived socially endorsed acts of disapproval; but dignity? Not a chance.
The article explains the plight of one Jeffrey Deskovic, wrongly convicted of a rape and killing sixteen years ago. Mr. Deskovic was exonerated through DNA evidence in 2006.
There is a story here, but not one that can be told in the column inches of a newspaper, and especially not one that resorts to cheap stunts to heighten the reader's emotional response while quietly manipulating him.
For example, the first lines --
As a boy, Jeffrey Mark Deskovic could swim the length of a pool underwater without coming up for air. On sultry days at the Elmira state prison, where he spent most of his 16 years behind bars for a rape and murder he did not commit, Mr. Deskovic would close his eyes under a row of outdoor showers and imagine himself swimming.
See how easily Mr. Deskovic's complex emotional response is condensed for public consumption? He was a swimmer, readers, and now, in jail, he can only imagine swimming! Isn't that sad? Don't you feel for him, reader?
Some later lines --
He had never lived alone, owned a car, scanned the classifieds in search of work. He had never voted, balanced a checkbook or learned to knot a tie.He missed the senior prom, the funeral of the grandmother who helped raise him, and his best friend’s wedding.
And, of course, the obligatory --
He said he had never made love.
Yes, can you imagine, reader? You, who take these things for granted, the knotting of ties, the attending of funerals, the making of love? Don't you feel for him?
No, you don't. Because the article depends on gawking at the man and taking an almost vindictive pleasure in enumerating his sorrows, the only thing it extracts from the reader is a reaction of pity. No attempt is made to portray Mr. Deskovic as a real human being; he is made out instead to be a degraded showpiece, losing all dignity in the face of this caricaturing of his life.
The New York Times is far from the only medium culpable; in fact, it seems that most American media is preoccupied with trying to peer into people's personal lives. Fox News, for example, uses its prime-time news broadcasts mainly to discuss rapes and murders of beautiful young women. TLC (The Learning Channel) ensures increased viewership by broadcasting graphic images of morbidly obese men and women undergoing medical treatment. Larry King and his ilk conduct celebrity interviews that reveal their subjects' personal lives in lurid detail. And so on.
To deplore this sort of relentless voyeurism, though, is misguided. We are all of us despicable in our own separate ways; who cannot claim to derive pleasure from another's pain? Which one among us is so enlightened that the fall of a famous personality does not cheer us in some undefinable way? If empathy is a human trait, then so is condescension. We can hope to preserve some sense of self-superiority by such contrived socially endorsed acts of disapproval; but dignity? Not a chance.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Read this article...
....and tell me if you don't think it contains the most hackneyed examples of pseudo-metaphorical bombast currently in existence.
Croatia end woeful England's Euro dream
Croatia end woeful England's Euro dream
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Pakistan off the Commonwealth
Apart from the consequences for world politics, this also means that Pakistani writers will be ineligible for Booker Prize nomination. Bye bye Mohsin Hamid.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Writing = empathy
Great books are filters, distilling from the everyday simple truths about our condition. They station themselves in the lives of their characters, and are content simply to observe; guileless, incapable of judgment, and completely unselfconscious, they invest in each of their characters a degree of empathy unqualified by the trammels of diurnal social discourse.
'A House for Mr. Biswas' is such a book. Set in the poverty stricken backdrop of rural Trinidad in the mid-twentieth century, the novel explores themes of longing and alienation while taking us through the life of the eponymous Mohun Biswas. The book deals with its subject matter compassionately but without degenerating, as lesser books usually do, into the sort of cloying sentimentality that makes one want to stop reading. It is also very well written -- the prose is subtle and graceful, and achieves powerful imagery through understatement.
As I read 'Biswas', I saw my own role changing as the pages sped by. From being more or less an interested observer, I was transformed first into a person who sympathized deeply, and then, inexorably, into one who felt as the characters, who felt with them. Identifying with the protagonist of a storyline is one thing -- the stuff of most hero-villain yarns -- but, as you might discover if you read this book, identifying with every single character can quickly turn into an almost sacred exercise in catharsis.
'A House for Mr. Biswas' is such a book. Set in the poverty stricken backdrop of rural Trinidad in the mid-twentieth century, the novel explores themes of longing and alienation while taking us through the life of the eponymous Mohun Biswas. The book deals with its subject matter compassionately but without degenerating, as lesser books usually do, into the sort of cloying sentimentality that makes one want to stop reading. It is also very well written -- the prose is subtle and graceful, and achieves powerful imagery through understatement.
As I read 'Biswas', I saw my own role changing as the pages sped by. From being more or less an interested observer, I was transformed first into a person who sympathized deeply, and then, inexorably, into one who felt as the characters, who felt with them. Identifying with the protagonist of a storyline is one thing -- the stuff of most hero-villain yarns -- but, as you might discover if you read this book, identifying with every single character can quickly turn into an almost sacred exercise in catharsis.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Saturday
Saturday,
The constant chatter of the week is replaced,
with a soft distant scrape.
You fight through a maze
of despondence,
through the noon hour.
Paper on the floor,
sticks to your feet.
You shake it off.
Evening arrives to find you
salivating, face against
pillow. You snore.
Outside, unseen,
lights of cars smear
on walls opposing.
And would you
show yourself?
Would you feel?
Saturday,
The trash man
will not come.
The constant chatter of the week is replaced,
with a soft distant scrape.
You fight through a maze
of despondence,
through the noon hour.
Paper on the floor,
sticks to your feet.
You shake it off.
Evening arrives to find you
salivating, face against
pillow. You snore.
Outside, unseen,
lights of cars smear
on walls opposing.
And would you
show yourself?
Would you feel?
Saturday,
The trash man
will not come.
Monday, November 5, 2007
(insert non-literal title here)
If I look at this picture for more than a few minutes, I begin to feel a little sentimental. How young we were, I begin to think. How many minutes have passed since then. Where are they now, my companions in this photograph? How far we have all come.
Then I log on to orkut, and see most of the other people in the photograph, going about their lives as normal, as accessible to me as they were twenty years ago. The nostalgic peremptoriness of a few seconds ago vanishes, replacing itself with a faint disregard for the people concerned. The photograph loses its beauty, becomes almost banal. I feel cheated.
In this world of email and social networking, can we still feel?
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Literary references...
...by their very nature, tend to obfuscate.
This blog, for example, frequently finds it tempting to insert literary allusions in its posts as an attempt to convince its imaginary audience of its author's erudition. Such posts might include quotes like the one below(by Karen Blixen, also known as Isak Dinesen) to make a point that may or may not be orthogonal to the semantics of the passage itself.
The gratuitous and (in the opinion of this blog's, at least) gauche display of soi-disant learnedness serves only to communicate the author's inability to explain the thrust of his argument by more direct means. By deferring to an authority higher than himself, the author displays an intellectual timidity that no degree of literary knowledge, however eclectic, can allay.
It is this blog's humble thesis, therefore, that overt references to works of literature be abandoned in essays that seek to divulge the motivations of an argument.
PS: An attempt to write in a more Nabokovian style.
This blog, for example, frequently finds it tempting to insert literary allusions in its posts as an attempt to convince its imaginary audience of its author's erudition. Such posts might include quotes like the one below(by Karen Blixen, also known as Isak Dinesen) to make a point that may or may not be orthogonal to the semantics of the passage itself.
and you, Marcus, have given me many things; now I shall give you this good advice. Be many people. Give up the game of being always Marcus Cocoza. You have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave and prisoner. You have not done anything without first considering how it would affect Marcus Cocoza's happiness and prestige. You were always much afraid that Marcus might do a stupid thing, or be bored. What would it really have mattered? All over the world people are doing stupid things... I should like you to be easy, your little heart to be light again. You must from now, be more than one, many people, as many as you can think of.
The gratuitous and (in the opinion of this blog's, at least) gauche display of soi-disant learnedness serves only to communicate the author's inability to explain the thrust of his argument by more direct means. By deferring to an authority higher than himself, the author displays an intellectual timidity that no degree of literary knowledge, however eclectic, can allay.
It is this blog's humble thesis, therefore, that overt references to works of literature be abandoned in essays that seek to divulge the motivations of an argument.
PS: An attempt to write in a more Nabokovian style.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Apple's intolerable smugness
I'm a fan of Apple and their products, but every six months or so I'm forced to become apologetic about my persuasions. This is because every six months or so, a Macworld convention is held.
The conventions are garish affairs, more about the company's image than about anything worth reporting; they are frequented by the kind of people capable of applauding the most fatuous of Steve Jobs pronouncements. More often than not these conventions are just vehicles of ridicule, used to poke fun at their looming competitor. Apple is nothing if not petty.
There is also much prevarication on display. Take, for example, the Macworld held in January this year, the one that announced the iPhone to the world. Of the many glib mouthings of Mr. Jobs at that conference, this one stands out for its utter lack of sincerity --
This is nearly a lie. Though there are currently very few viruses for Mac OS X, there's no reason why that should not change in a hurry. In fact, Kevin Finisterre of Digital Munition proclaimed, in January 2006, that he would show up one security flaw in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger for every day of the month of February, and then proceeded to do just that. Get this in your head, Mr. Jobs -- Macs can have viruses too.
All this wouldn't be so bad if Apple was really all it claimed to be, but it's not. Its incompetence at handling customer issues is well known, as is its lack of regard for post-release product flaws. As an example of the former, take the DVD burner issue of a few months ago. Apple released a firmware update for Macbook DVD drives in May 2007. By June, there were complaints from hundreds of Macbook users (including one from myself), who claimed that their drives were defunct as a result of the update.
Save for removing the upgrade from their servers, Apple did nothing to resolve the issue. Never mind the myriad complaints on three separate forums; never mind the suppressed indignation of Apple devotees; never mind the hundreds of people who weren't under warranty when they trustingly downloaded the update. Never mind the customer.
Apple also has a bad case of foot-in-mouth. After months and months of deploring Windows Vista at every possible opportunity, they released Leopard (their latest operating system) on Friday, six pm local time. By seven-thirty this forum already had its first entry -- a poor Apple zealot, while installing Leopard on his machine, encountered a hitch that refused to go away. The good man actually waited for half an hour hoping the installation would complete on its own, and perhaps went through a brief moment of denial before giving in and posting to the discussion board.
In the two and a half days since, there have been upwards of 350 entries to the board, and Apple, in response, has posted a makeshift solution that does not come close to resolving the issue.
Grow up, Apple. Seriously. Or shut the fuck up.
The conventions are garish affairs, more about the company's image than about anything worth reporting; they are frequented by the kind of people capable of applauding the most fatuous of Steve Jobs pronouncements. More often than not these conventions are just vehicles of ridicule, used to poke fun at their looming competitor. Apple is nothing if not petty.
There is also much prevarication on display. Take, for example, the Macworld held in January this year, the one that announced the iPhone to the world. Of the many glib mouthings of Mr. Jobs at that conference, this one stands out for its utter lack of sincerity --
114, 000 viruses? Not on a Mac.
This is nearly a lie. Though there are currently very few viruses for Mac OS X, there's no reason why that should not change in a hurry. In fact, Kevin Finisterre of Digital Munition proclaimed, in January 2006, that he would show up one security flaw in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger for every day of the month of February, and then proceeded to do just that. Get this in your head, Mr. Jobs -- Macs can have viruses too.
All this wouldn't be so bad if Apple was really all it claimed to be, but it's not. Its incompetence at handling customer issues is well known, as is its lack of regard for post-release product flaws. As an example of the former, take the DVD burner issue of a few months ago. Apple released a firmware update for Macbook DVD drives in May 2007. By June, there were complaints from hundreds of Macbook users (including one from myself), who claimed that their drives were defunct as a result of the update.
Save for removing the upgrade from their servers, Apple did nothing to resolve the issue. Never mind the myriad complaints on three separate forums; never mind the suppressed indignation of Apple devotees; never mind the hundreds of people who weren't under warranty when they trustingly downloaded the update. Never mind the customer.
Apple also has a bad case of foot-in-mouth. After months and months of deploring Windows Vista at every possible opportunity, they released Leopard (their latest operating system) on Friday, six pm local time. By seven-thirty this forum already had its first entry -- a poor Apple zealot, while installing Leopard on his machine, encountered a hitch that refused to go away. The good man actually waited for half an hour hoping the installation would complete on its own, and perhaps went through a brief moment of denial before giving in and posting to the discussion board.
In the two and a half days since, there have been upwards of 350 entries to the board, and Apple, in response, has posted a makeshift solution that does not come close to resolving the issue.
Grow up, Apple. Seriously. Or shut the fuck up.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Unaware
We would walk
by the TV sets at dawn --
and watch as Mister
P. oozed oil on
to the fire.
Feeling as
mud walls in a blaze or numb--
as cotton pods; who
could tell the
difference?
The silence,
spreading under our watchful
eyes, blinding us
with nothing less than
ambivalence.
Our failings,
dodged us, their blanched veneers
like windowless
houses desolate
once again.
And once more,
we circled beneath the freshly
clotted copper
sheen of sunset --
unaware.
by the TV sets at dawn --
and watch as Mister
P. oozed oil on
to the fire.
Feeling as
mud walls in a blaze or numb--
as cotton pods; who
could tell the
difference?
The silence,
spreading under our watchful
eyes, blinding us
with nothing less than
ambivalence.
Our failings,
dodged us, their blanched veneers
like windowless
houses desolate
once again.
And once more,
we circled beneath the freshly
clotted copper
sheen of sunset --
unaware.
Monday, October 22, 2007
A brief comment
J.K. Rowling has declared Albus Dumbledore gay. In a press conference earlier this week, she revealed that Dumbledore was attracted to Grindlewald, a wizard whose powers, at their peak, were comparable to Dumbledore's own.
I'm offended by this pronouncement, not because I'm homophobic (I'm not), but because it appears to be a cynical attempt to gain media attention and redirect it towards the books. Never has the sexual preference of any character in the series been relevant; in fact, one could perhaps point toward the absence of sex in the books as evidence toward the (obviously absurd) assumption that everyone in the series is homosexual.
Even more ridiculous is the gay community's reaction to the announcement. Peter Tatchell, a gay activist of some repute, had this to say, 'But I am disappointed that she did not make Dumbledore's sexuality explicit in the Harry Potter book. Making it obvious would have sent a much more powerful message of understanding and acceptance.'
Hardly that. The books are not exercises in twenty-first century sexual liberation, with commentary on society's inability to accept homosexuals. In fact, I would argue that any such attempt would have distracted from the thematic elements of the story while being jarring and pretentious. Whatever her other literary merits, J.K. Rowling is no explorer of the human condition.
No, the only explanation is that Ms. Rowling, after all her superhuman accomplishments of the past few years, is now displaying disturbing signs of humanity.
I'm offended by this pronouncement, not because I'm homophobic (I'm not), but because it appears to be a cynical attempt to gain media attention and redirect it towards the books. Never has the sexual preference of any character in the series been relevant; in fact, one could perhaps point toward the absence of sex in the books as evidence toward the (obviously absurd) assumption that everyone in the series is homosexual.
Even more ridiculous is the gay community's reaction to the announcement. Peter Tatchell, a gay activist of some repute, had this to say, 'But I am disappointed that she did not make Dumbledore's sexuality explicit in the Harry Potter book. Making it obvious would have sent a much more powerful message of understanding and acceptance.'
Hardly that. The books are not exercises in twenty-first century sexual liberation, with commentary on society's inability to accept homosexuals. In fact, I would argue that any such attempt would have distracted from the thematic elements of the story while being jarring and pretentious. Whatever her other literary merits, J.K. Rowling is no explorer of the human condition.
No, the only explanation is that Ms. Rowling, after all her superhuman accomplishments of the past few years, is now displaying disturbing signs of humanity.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
A critique of my own writing -- part 1
I've spent the past few days looking at stuff I've written -- emails, comments on blogs, articles, bachelor's theses (just the one, actually), rants on forums, and almost anything else that I can get my hands on -- in the hope of being able to view my prose objectively and therefore improve it.
A little context here -- it's really difficult for me to criticize (positively or negatively) my own writing, especially after I've just written it. The loss of perspective while surveying one's own work is of course widely known, and I will not go into it here. Suffice it to say that I can only view my written work with either extreme pride or intense disgust; objectivity, during these occasions, is a distant dream.
I used to spend the first few months when I discovered this woods-for-trees phenomenon groping about in contrived self-pity. Here, I thought, was a perfectly good person (myself), in pursuit of a perfectly admirable goal (writing a good book). And what should come between the goal and its execution but my stupid ego and its frustrating inability to understand my writing. Woe was me.
No longer, because I have belatedly discovered that I can blog (oh, how I despise that verb!) about it. For the next few weeks or so, I will be putting up sporadic thoughts about my writing and how I can improve it. These blog posts will highlight my inadequacies as a writer by primarily focusing on patterns that have surfaced in my prose over the period of the past three years. If nothing else, these articles should at least serve as interesting exercises in style.
The uninterested (who number, no doubt, in the billions) should avert their eyes now.
A little context here -- it's really difficult for me to criticize (positively or negatively) my own writing, especially after I've just written it. The loss of perspective while surveying one's own work is of course widely known, and I will not go into it here. Suffice it to say that I can only view my written work with either extreme pride or intense disgust; objectivity, during these occasions, is a distant dream.
I used to spend the first few months when I discovered this woods-for-trees phenomenon groping about in contrived self-pity. Here, I thought, was a perfectly good person (myself), in pursuit of a perfectly admirable goal (writing a good book). And what should come between the goal and its execution but my stupid ego and its frustrating inability to understand my writing. Woe was me.
No longer, because I have belatedly discovered that I can blog (oh, how I despise that verb!) about it. For the next few weeks or so, I will be putting up sporadic thoughts about my writing and how I can improve it. These blog posts will highlight my inadequacies as a writer by primarily focusing on patterns that have surfaced in my prose over the period of the past three years. If nothing else, these articles should at least serve as interesting exercises in style.
The uninterested (who number, no doubt, in the billions) should avert their eyes now.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
What was relevant then....
...is relevant now.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats, obviously.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats, obviously.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Misdirected articulateness and Salon.com
This article by Glenn Greenwald (of Salon.com) reminded me of something I'd written a couple of months ago to a friend. Actually, almost everything on Salon nowadays reminds me of that email, which I will reproduce below, but not without first commenting on a certain pattern that I observe emerging from the liberal half of the blogosphere.
Before the comments, however, here are a few definitions.
Neocon -- A person who professes great love for America and American values. Supports (on principle) the current war in Iraq and hopes for a future one on Iran. Opposes (on principle) abortion, homosexuality, birth control. Professes great indignation at the moral excesses of the modern world. Is Christian. Dislikes/hates (on principle) all other religions. Is very probably xenophobic. Is not amenable to argument.
Liberal -- A person who is the opposite of a neocon, and that too not by choice; a liberal defines himself as being everything a neocon is not, with the exception that he shares the non-amenability-to-argument characteristic. He might also be Christian, though this is typically irrelevant.
Salon.com -- a liberal stronghold.
Given these definitions (without context) most people would conclude that the best thing to do would be to ignore these neocons, who seem at least moderately deranged. But apparently liberals can't get enough of them. They (and by they I mean entities like Salon.com as well as individuals like Mr. Greenwald) examine statements made by neocons and then go forth and denounce them strenuously.
And, inevitably, people follow its example. Whether they do so consciously or not I cannot say, but the fact remains that most liberal bloggers today are content -- happy, even -- to react with outrage to any and all statements that they may come across that seem 'neocon' enough.
Anyway, now that you know where I'm coming from, read the email.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/08/20/rove/
The title of the article is 'The poisonous rhetorical legacy of Karl Rove', which should tell you a bit about how the author likes to make his argument. Indeed, in an article at least 1500 words long, he enumerates everything that makes Rove untrustworthy and loathsome, citing examples from as long as twenty years ago. Verbosity notwithstanding, though, the article can be summarized in one sentence -- `Karl Rove is a cunning man who furthers Republican values at any cost.'
The problem with this approach to denouncing his agenda is subtle but real. If there is nothing more to Karl Rove than his desire to defend Republicanism, then there is no point in subjecting him to the sort of pseudo-intellectual analysis that the author attempts in the article -- it is as misguided as trying to dissect a bully's intentions. If, on the other hand, there is more to him than meets the eye -- if he is in fact driven by motivations that hide beneath the veneer of Democrat-hatred that he so earnestly assumes, then the analysis is incomplete, scratching not even the surface. I would argue, in fact, that the author does not possess the intellectual equipment to make such an analysis.
Of course, at some level this is sophistry, because we all know that the sole agendum of Karl Rove is to bash liberals, which absolves the author from any scholarly responsibility he may have had. People say that the Bush government has galvanized satire in an unprecedented manner, but I say it has also galvanized the sort of ersatz erudition exemplified in articles such as the one above. It is easy to sound intelligent when the subject of your argument is not.
I wrote this email, I guess, to expand upon the point I tried to make on the phone yesterday. If the primary objective of a debate is to provoke a questioning of morals, ideas and motivations, then perhaps it is worth conducting; if, on the other hand, it is used as a means to proselytize, to establish a boundary between imaginary aesthetic goals (Pro-choice or pro-life? Support gays or bash them? Right or Wrong?) it degenerates into insubstantiality. Arguments can only help deal with problems, not solve them.
Before the comments, however, here are a few definitions.
Neocon -- A person who professes great love for America and American values. Supports (on principle) the current war in Iraq and hopes for a future one on Iran. Opposes (on principle) abortion, homosexuality, birth control. Professes great indignation at the moral excesses of the modern world. Is Christian. Dislikes/hates (on principle) all other religions. Is very probably xenophobic. Is not amenable to argument.
Liberal -- A person who is the opposite of a neocon, and that too not by choice; a liberal defines himself as being everything a neocon is not, with the exception that he shares the non-amenability-to-argument characteristic. He might also be Christian, though this is typically irrelevant.
Salon.com -- a liberal stronghold.
Given these definitions (without context) most people would conclude that the best thing to do would be to ignore these neocons, who seem at least moderately deranged. But apparently liberals can't get enough of them. They (and by they I mean entities like Salon.com as well as individuals like Mr. Greenwald) examine statements made by neocons and then go forth and denounce them strenuously.
And, inevitably, people follow its example. Whether they do so consciously or not I cannot say, but the fact remains that most liberal bloggers today are content -- happy, even -- to react with outrage to any and all statements that they may come across that seem 'neocon' enough.
Anyway, now that you know where I'm coming from, read the email.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/08/20/rove/
The title of the article is 'The poisonous rhetorical legacy of Karl Rove', which should tell you a bit about how the author likes to make his argument. Indeed, in an article at least 1500 words long, he enumerates everything that makes Rove untrustworthy and loathsome, citing examples from as long as twenty years ago. Verbosity notwithstanding, though, the article can be summarized in one sentence -- `Karl Rove is a cunning man who furthers Republican values at any cost.'
The problem with this approach to denouncing his agenda is subtle but real. If there is nothing more to Karl Rove than his desire to defend Republicanism, then there is no point in subjecting him to the sort of pseudo-intellectual analysis that the author attempts in the article -- it is as misguided as trying to dissect a bully's intentions. If, on the other hand, there is more to him than meets the eye -- if he is in fact driven by motivations that hide beneath the veneer of Democrat-hatred that he so earnestly assumes, then the analysis is incomplete, scratching not even the surface. I would argue, in fact, that the author does not possess the intellectual equipment to make such an analysis.
Of course, at some level this is sophistry, because we all know that the sole agendum of Karl Rove is to bash liberals, which absolves the author from any scholarly responsibility he may have had. People say that the Bush government has galvanized satire in an unprecedented manner, but I say it has also galvanized the sort of ersatz erudition exemplified in articles such as the one above. It is easy to sound intelligent when the subject of your argument is not.
I wrote this email, I guess, to expand upon the point I tried to make on the phone yesterday. If the primary objective of a debate is to provoke a questioning of morals, ideas and motivations, then perhaps it is worth conducting; if, on the other hand, it is used as a means to proselytize, to establish a boundary between imaginary aesthetic goals (Pro-choice or pro-life? Support gays or bash them? Right or Wrong?) it degenerates into insubstantiality. Arguments can only help deal with problems, not solve them.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
The semantics of fraught prose
Read the following snippet of film criticism by Stephanie Zacharek --
In the first sentence, see how the author qualifies "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" with the adjectives 'static' and 'stilted'. Now read the next section of the same sentence, where "The Royal Tenenbaums" is qualified by 'eccentric-family' and 'quirkfest'. A cursory scan of the remainder of the paragraph reveals a similar pattern, that of placing at least two adjectives before every noun -- she speaks of the "aggressively fey charms of "Rushmore"", of the director exhibiting an "aging hipster gimcrackery", of "new young DIY" filmmakers, and so on unceasingly.
Adjectives have an important role to play in any piece of prose, but that role is a supporting one . You can't just go on and sprinkle adjectives before each noun in the hope that you will sound smarter, or pithier -- it doesn't work that way. Let me take an(other) example to show you what I mean --
Before --
After --
See what I mean? By inserting an arbitrary number of adjectives before each noun, my prose achieves a garishness it previously did not have. More importantly (and worryingly, at least for me), its meaning is hidden. What do I want to say here? Do I really need to describe the chair reposing by the fireplace in such excruciating detail? Does my description even 'work'? (The answer, of course, is that it does not).
I think such prose stems from authorial self-consciousness, when the writer degenerates from a person who wants to tell the truth to a person who wants to sound intelligent. There are two stages that accompany such a degeneracy. First, the writer scans his piece of writing (an article, say) looking to improve it in some abstract way. He doesn't yet know how, only that he must. When a perfunctory perusal reveals no means by which he can accomplish such an improvement, the writer grows a little anxious. This is the time of his greatest peril. If the author can somehow recognize the clouds of self-consciousness asserting themselves in the otherwise clear sky of his mind (see how fraught that sentence was?), perhaps he can avert disaster. If he cannot, though, he begins to see -- and take -- the easy way out, interposing himself, as he does, between the reader and his prose.
What is the easy way out? Why, to use adjectives, of course. Let's see. I can use the word 'static' to describe "The Life Aquatic by Steve Zissou". What else, what else. I need one more adjective, something that will convey my erudition while still being condescending. I got it! 'Stilted'! And the beauty of the thing is, when I write "the static, stilted "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,", I will have an alliteration! What a great writer I must be! Now let's do the same thing with the rest of the article.
And so you have the beginning of the end. For the benefit of Stephanie Zacharek and others (including myself), let me say this -- no piece of writing, however small, can be improved just by inserting an arbitrary number of adjectives/adverbs as qualifiers. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Read the entire article, if you want to.
Anderson's movies -- the static, stilted "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," the eccentric-family quirkfest "The Royal Tenenbaums" -- have always left me cold. I remain unmoved even by the aggressively fey charms of "Rushmore." "The Darjeeling Limited" -- which opens the New York Film Festival this evening, and opens elsewhere beginning tomorrow -- is the first of Anderson's movies that has elicited even the mildest scrap of affection from me: I feel warmly toward it, although I reserve the right to remain wary of its aging-hipster gimcrackery. It's as if Anderson, yesterday's next big thing, heard the homemade coffee-can drumbeat of new young DIY filmmakers like Andrew Bujalski and Joe Swanberg and realized that what the kids are into these days is shambling, sincere naturalism; his stock in trade, whimsical, deadpan irony, all meticulously orchestrated from the master control center of his brain, is starting to seem as outmoded as an old Mantovani record. Better inject some juice, and attempt at least an approximation of spontaneity, fast.
In the first sentence, see how the author qualifies "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" with the adjectives 'static' and 'stilted'. Now read the next section of the same sentence, where "The Royal Tenenbaums" is qualified by 'eccentric-family' and 'quirkfest'. A cursory scan of the remainder of the paragraph reveals a similar pattern, that of placing at least two adjectives before every noun -- she speaks of the "aggressively fey charms of "Rushmore"", of the director exhibiting an "aging hipster gimcrackery", of "new young DIY" filmmakers, and so on unceasingly.
Adjectives have an important role to play in any piece of prose, but that role is a supporting one . You can't just go on and sprinkle adjectives before each noun in the hope that you will sound smarter, or pithier -- it doesn't work that way. Let me take an(other) example to show you what I mean --
Before --
The chair reposed in the corner by the fireplace.
After --
The chair, whose wooden legs gave off a grim, suffocating smell of nascent varnish and whose seat, with its abbreviated edges and too-small base, seemed to invite only the most elliptical of posteriors, reposed smugly by the flickering fireplace, as if cocked in wait for its next unsuspecting occupant.
See what I mean? By inserting an arbitrary number of adjectives before each noun, my prose achieves a garishness it previously did not have. More importantly (and worryingly, at least for me), its meaning is hidden. What do I want to say here? Do I really need to describe the chair reposing by the fireplace in such excruciating detail? Does my description even 'work'? (The answer, of course, is that it does not).
I think such prose stems from authorial self-consciousness, when the writer degenerates from a person who wants to tell the truth to a person who wants to sound intelligent. There are two stages that accompany such a degeneracy. First, the writer scans his piece of writing (an article, say) looking to improve it in some abstract way. He doesn't yet know how, only that he must. When a perfunctory perusal reveals no means by which he can accomplish such an improvement, the writer grows a little anxious. This is the time of his greatest peril. If the author can somehow recognize the clouds of self-consciousness asserting themselves in the otherwise clear sky of his mind (see how fraught that sentence was?), perhaps he can avert disaster. If he cannot, though, he begins to see -- and take -- the easy way out, interposing himself, as he does, between the reader and his prose.
What is the easy way out? Why, to use adjectives, of course. Let's see. I can use the word 'static' to describe "The Life Aquatic by Steve Zissou". What else, what else. I need one more adjective, something that will convey my erudition while still being condescending. I got it! 'Stilted'! And the beauty of the thing is, when I write "the static, stilted "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,", I will have an alliteration! What a great writer I must be! Now let's do the same thing with the rest of the article.
And so you have the beginning of the end. For the benefit of Stephanie Zacharek and others (including myself), let me say this -- no piece of writing, however small, can be improved just by inserting an arbitrary number of adjectives/adverbs as qualifiers. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Read the entire article, if you want to.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Art and how it emerges
In this post I will discuss the reasons for the barrenness of this blog.
First of all -- I have finally begun my second book. Yes, it's true -- after many false starts and self-conscious stutters, Expatriate has finally taken off. It has an abiding theme, a main character who is unlike me in as many ways as she can possibly be (this is not to say that she is my opposite -- that would perhaps be too easy), and at least one subplot that supplements a main one. So far I've written about seven thousand words, and the characters are -- after much prompting on my part-- finally coming alive.
In the course of writing (what little I have of) Expatriate, I've discovered
something fundamental about art in general and writing in particular. Now I'm typically quite cautious while suggesting theories that seek to generalize -- if the past few years have taught me anything, it is that there are no absolutes that anyone can establish, and that everything is subject to a personal interpretation. What I'm about to say, therefore, also falls into this category, and should be regarded as such.
The observation is this -- self-consciousness leads eventually to self-expression. If art is about the observation of truths that lie within, then egotism and hubris are its necessary precursors.
By way of example, let us examine Orkut, a popular social network (at least in India). Orkut allows its members -- who are typically in the 15-30 age group -- to communicate with each other in various different ways, including scrapping (a 'scrap' is just a small asynchronous chat message) & sending email. Each user has his own page, where he can highlight his uniqueness by means of specifying various attributes; at the very bottom of this page is a space devoted to 'testimonials', which are just small paragraphs of praise and (loving) scorn authored by his friends.
Let us examine the various ways in which this particular model emphasizes the self. There is the main body of the user page, of course, which helpfully consists of an 'About Me' section. This section is probably the most popular one, and the one most likely to be full on a random user page. People love talking about themselves, and when they're provided with a forum to do so, they find they have so much to say that they cannot stop. One good thing about this section is that it inspires even the most inarticulate to write, and in so doing at least some of them discover the joys of writing (what they discover is actually the joy of self-expression, but more on that later).
After the 'about me' section comes a whole lot of other personal information, including ethnicity, religion, hometown, blog page, favorite books, movies, cuisine, and so on. These sections are also exploited by most users in ways that attempt to highlight their uniqueness. For example, a random user reveals the following about his movie preferences --
Instead of simply enlisting all his favorite movies (note that 'he' is used as a universal pronoun, and is not indicative of person's gender), he uses the opportunity to say something more, something that tightens the social box around him.
Finally, there is the testimonial. Testimonials are a way of affirming your friend's individuality as well as his ability to function in society.
Here is an example from another user's page --
Testimonials have an important role to play in self-discovery. Think about it -- would your best friend, in any social situation, tell you that you are a lovely human being? Or tell you how awesome you are? Obviously not. What these testimonials do is affirm your position in a person's heart and therefore also in the world. Given that our lives are a dichotomy of obstinate self-sufficiency and the solicitation of approval, there is no better thing that to know that one's friends are unconditionally supportive. This support, at the very least, encourages one to explore oneself.
However, before the purity of self-discovery comes the bully-like cowardliness of self-consciousness (note that I am assigning imaginary aesthetic attributes to aspects of human nature; this should not be taken as evidence of an attempt to establish a moral high-ground. Think of it instead as a metaphorical digression to make a point.). Before an average orkut user can discover himself, he first has to go through a phase where he places himself on a pedestal. Distracted by all these various affirmations of his individuality, he takes the easier path, which is one fraught with ego-clashes and judgmental behavior and dismissive attitudes. In this phase, the user is the king of all he surveys. The people in his life are assigned roles that they will always play in his mind, regardless of how the people themselves might change. For example, a friend could be privately labeled an idiot, and no matter how much that friend may display evidence as to the contrary, the label remains incontrovertible.
This phase stays as long as it has to, but in the end the person himself has control over when it leaves. The key to the abandonment of such an attitude is the realization that his character judgments are flawed. None of us, unfortunately, possess so little uniqueness that we can be pigeonholed so glibly. And this ultimately rescues us, because we realize simultaneously that we are special, and that we are not -- that is to say, everyone else is at least as special as we are.
Once this disillusionment sets in, two things can happen. The easier path, of course, is the same obstinate approach to life that was discussed earlier, where everything is reduced to an sound-bite-like faux simplicity. However, if one is alert enough, a transformation begins to occur. A person begins to ask himself about himself; he begins to explore what he is truly about. What 'gets' him? What fills him with dread? What awakens him? What does he feel? What is he?
These questions surface inexorably, once encouraged. No longer does he abide superficiality; no longer does he sleepwalk through the day. Also endemic to this phase is an enveloping sadness about everything, because nothing (and no one) is as simple as he once thought it was. All aspects of his life demand reinterpretations that are themselves subject to change. This phase of grieving is apparently called existential angst, though please do not quote me on that (my knowledge of philosophy is restricted to the argot of the average urbanite). The grief is augmented by an acceptance of the mutability of absolutes and the reluctant abandonment of judgment. Because everything is as alive as you are, it has to be subject to the same partial treatment that you give yourself. This phase is hard to deal with, at least initially, because the notion of superiority of the self pervades all walks of your life.
I think most people who reach this phase never escape from it, at least not fully. To exist in a society such as ours we need to preserve some notion of our own magnificence. We need to know that we are good, and that no one better than us can change that fact. At the same time, we know that there is probably no such thing as 'good', at least not in the way that we imagine it. Perhaps it was this cruel conflict that inspired Henry David Thoreau to mark that all men led lives of quiet desperation.
But the good thing about this phase is that we also find an urge to express ourselves in whatever way we possibly can. It is our consolation, in this big bad world, that we are all possessed of a right-hemisphere that allows us to think, for lack of a better word, creatively. And it is an even bigger consolation that we are given (some would say by God), all these appendages, these arms, these feet, to lend form and structure to this creativity. And so we 'create'. If you want to label these creations, you might as well call them art. I know I do.
Well, this post started off being a bullet-point like enlistment of my various activities this past month, and has evolved into something else entirely. It's heartening to know that I can write even though I haven't been reading much (this past month I've only read a single book, and a small one at that), but on the other hand I don't think I would be of much use writing topical articles like the ones you see in newspapers or magazines. Maybe if I restricted myself to only popular topics like the war in Iraq things might go a little better. Let's see.
First of all -- I have finally begun my second book. Yes, it's true -- after many false starts and self-conscious stutters, Expatriate has finally taken off. It has an abiding theme, a main character who is unlike me in as many ways as she can possibly be (this is not to say that she is my opposite -- that would perhaps be too easy), and at least one subplot that supplements a main one. So far I've written about seven thousand words, and the characters are -- after much prompting on my part-- finally coming alive.
In the course of writing (what little I have of) Expatriate, I've discovered
something fundamental about art in general and writing in particular. Now I'm typically quite cautious while suggesting theories that seek to generalize -- if the past few years have taught me anything, it is that there are no absolutes that anyone can establish, and that everything is subject to a personal interpretation. What I'm about to say, therefore, also falls into this category, and should be regarded as such.
The observation is this -- self-consciousness leads eventually to self-expression. If art is about the observation of truths that lie within, then egotism and hubris are its necessary precursors.
By way of example, let us examine Orkut, a popular social network (at least in India). Orkut allows its members -- who are typically in the 15-30 age group -- to communicate with each other in various different ways, including scrapping (a 'scrap' is just a small asynchronous chat message) & sending email. Each user has his own page, where he can highlight his uniqueness by means of specifying various attributes; at the very bottom of this page is a space devoted to 'testimonials', which are just small paragraphs of praise and (loving) scorn authored by his friends.
Let us examine the various ways in which this particular model emphasizes the self. There is the main body of the user page, of course, which helpfully consists of an 'About Me' section. This section is probably the most popular one, and the one most likely to be full on a random user page. People love talking about themselves, and when they're provided with a forum to do so, they find they have so much to say that they cannot stop. One good thing about this section is that it inspires even the most inarticulate to write, and in so doing at least some of them discover the joys of writing (what they discover is actually the joy of self-expression, but more on that later).
After the 'about me' section comes a whole lot of other personal information, including ethnicity, religion, hometown, blog page, favorite books, movies, cuisine, and so on. These sections are also exploited by most users in ways that attempt to highlight their uniqueness. For example, a random user reveals the following about his movie preferences --
Ny thing worth watching with a strong storyline.All of Kamal movies.Art and crossover kinda stuff. MANI RATNAM movies a definite in my must watch list
Instead of simply enlisting all his favorite movies (note that 'he' is used as a universal pronoun, and is not indicative of person's gender), he uses the opportunity to say something more, something that tightens the social box around him.
Finally, there is the testimonial. Testimonials are a way of affirming your friend's individuality as well as his ability to function in society.
Here is an example from another user's page --
MY BEAST FRIEND i mean BEST FRIEND. --- is a cool cat.
--- is my childhood friend and boy we had a great childhood. the only thing that annyos me abt --- is that -- pulls my cheek's really badly.well for a friend like that sab kuch maf hai. --- is a trust worthy person and a lovely human being (dont take the human part too seriously i still doubt it myself)
well --- its been a pleasure knowing u and i know that u r going to say the samething abt me
Testimonials have an important role to play in self-discovery. Think about it -- would your best friend, in any social situation, tell you that you are a lovely human being? Or tell you how awesome you are? Obviously not. What these testimonials do is affirm your position in a person's heart and therefore also in the world. Given that our lives are a dichotomy of obstinate self-sufficiency and the solicitation of approval, there is no better thing that to know that one's friends are unconditionally supportive. This support, at the very least, encourages one to explore oneself.
However, before the purity of self-discovery comes the bully-like cowardliness of self-consciousness (note that I am assigning imaginary aesthetic attributes to aspects of human nature; this should not be taken as evidence of an attempt to establish a moral high-ground. Think of it instead as a metaphorical digression to make a point.). Before an average orkut user can discover himself, he first has to go through a phase where he places himself on a pedestal. Distracted by all these various affirmations of his individuality, he takes the easier path, which is one fraught with ego-clashes and judgmental behavior and dismissive attitudes. In this phase, the user is the king of all he surveys. The people in his life are assigned roles that they will always play in his mind, regardless of how the people themselves might change. For example, a friend could be privately labeled an idiot, and no matter how much that friend may display evidence as to the contrary, the label remains incontrovertible.
This phase stays as long as it has to, but in the end the person himself has control over when it leaves. The key to the abandonment of such an attitude is the realization that his character judgments are flawed. None of us, unfortunately, possess so little uniqueness that we can be pigeonholed so glibly. And this ultimately rescues us, because we realize simultaneously that we are special, and that we are not -- that is to say, everyone else is at least as special as we are.
Once this disillusionment sets in, two things can happen. The easier path, of course, is the same obstinate approach to life that was discussed earlier, where everything is reduced to an sound-bite-like faux simplicity. However, if one is alert enough, a transformation begins to occur. A person begins to ask himself about himself; he begins to explore what he is truly about. What 'gets' him? What fills him with dread? What awakens him? What does he feel? What is he?
These questions surface inexorably, once encouraged. No longer does he abide superficiality; no longer does he sleepwalk through the day. Also endemic to this phase is an enveloping sadness about everything, because nothing (and no one) is as simple as he once thought it was. All aspects of his life demand reinterpretations that are themselves subject to change. This phase of grieving is apparently called existential angst, though please do not quote me on that (my knowledge of philosophy is restricted to the argot of the average urbanite). The grief is augmented by an acceptance of the mutability of absolutes and the reluctant abandonment of judgment. Because everything is as alive as you are, it has to be subject to the same partial treatment that you give yourself. This phase is hard to deal with, at least initially, because the notion of superiority of the self pervades all walks of your life.
I think most people who reach this phase never escape from it, at least not fully. To exist in a society such as ours we need to preserve some notion of our own magnificence. We need to know that we are good, and that no one better than us can change that fact. At the same time, we know that there is probably no such thing as 'good', at least not in the way that we imagine it. Perhaps it was this cruel conflict that inspired Henry David Thoreau to mark that all men led lives of quiet desperation.
But the good thing about this phase is that we also find an urge to express ourselves in whatever way we possibly can. It is our consolation, in this big bad world, that we are all possessed of a right-hemisphere that allows us to think, for lack of a better word, creatively. And it is an even bigger consolation that we are given (some would say by God), all these appendages, these arms, these feet, to lend form and structure to this creativity. And so we 'create'. If you want to label these creations, you might as well call them art. I know I do.
Well, this post started off being a bullet-point like enlistment of my various activities this past month, and has evolved into something else entirely. It's heartening to know that I can write even though I haven't been reading much (this past month I've only read a single book, and a small one at that), but on the other hand I don't think I would be of much use writing topical articles like the ones you see in newspapers or magazines. Maybe if I restricted myself to only popular topics like the war in Iraq things might go a little better. Let's see.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Apple vs Apple
Another thing I wrote quite a while ago. Just putting it up..
Apple vs. Apple
How the company must change itself if it wants to succeed
Apple have been pushing hard these past few years for a paradigm shift, and with the introduction of the iPhone and iTV at San Francisco this January, seem poised to finally establish it. Sales on the iTunes store have reached 2 billion songs, there are more iPods around than all its competitors combined, and customers eagerly anticipate the release of Leopard, their new operating system.
The competition looks like it could not be more beleaguered. Microsoft have been attacked many times these past few months, for everything from the tepidity of their MP3 player, the Zune, to the considerable security issues in Vista, their brand-new operating system. They have been accused of lack of foresight, of plagiarism, of heavy-handed manipulation of smaller companies, and of plain laziness. Detractors assert that Microsoft has lost whatever attraction it might have had, both as a company and as an entity; they are clunky, unimaginative, and boring, much like their products.
Conditions are ripe for a change, and Apple, with its current reputation and credibility, appears to be the agent that can bring about this change. After all, who better than the inventors of the iPod to rejuvenate the phthisic computer industry?
Not quite, or at least not yet. Apple has its own failings that may vitiate whatever momentum it has gained in the recent past, failings that are representative of Apple's attitude as a whole. These are not issues that can be glossed over at a moment's notice, or dismissed as irrelevant; as Apple begins to sell more products, they will obtrude upon its progress significantly.
Among these issues, the most pertinent is one of cost. A Macbook (Apple's bestselling laptop brand) is today almost twice as expensive as a Windows machine with the same hardware configuration, while not offering much more in terms of reliability or support; their customer service packages are uniformly unaffordable; and even relatively mundane products such as mices and earphones are pricey beyond reason. High costs scare away prospective buyers with little money to spend, and performance-conscious ones as well.
Also, while Apple's operating systems don't seem to be crippled by viruses and spyware in the same way that Microsoft's are, there is nothing inherently more secure about them. Kevin Finisterre, founder of a computer security firm called Digital Munition, became a celebrity of sorts in the computer world when he claimed that he would expose one security flaw in Tiger (the most recent avatar of Apple's many operating systems) every day in January 2007 -- and succeeded. It is only a matter of time, he says, before viruses are written for the Mac. Meanwhile, customers are lulled into a false sense of security by Apple's glib dismissals of viruses on their websites and in their advertisements ("114,000 viruses? Not on a Mac.").
Which brings us to their ad campaign. Apple have always been acutely aware of their giant competitor, and have used confrontational strategies in most of their ads to bring about awareness of their own products. Now, however, they seem to have stepped up the self-congratulatory feel a notch, with their new Mac-PC ads, which feature an aging, obese and cynical man as a metaphor for Microsoft while depicting Apple as a hip twenty-something youth, derogatorily commiserative in conversations with his counterpart. Though somewhat funny, these ads have polarized opinions of the Mac community in the past few months. Apple have always possessed an understated presumptuousness in their mien, but these ads have transformed that understatement into something much more overt and mean-spirited; at best, this is a miscalculation.
Apple have a significant advantage over Microsoft, entering the year; whether they emerge from it triumphantly or indifferently is only for them to decide.
Apple vs. Apple
How the company must change itself if it wants to succeed
Apple have been pushing hard these past few years for a paradigm shift, and with the introduction of the iPhone and iTV at San Francisco this January, seem poised to finally establish it. Sales on the iTunes store have reached 2 billion songs, there are more iPods around than all its competitors combined, and customers eagerly anticipate the release of Leopard, their new operating system.
The competition looks like it could not be more beleaguered. Microsoft have been attacked many times these past few months, for everything from the tepidity of their MP3 player, the Zune, to the considerable security issues in Vista, their brand-new operating system. They have been accused of lack of foresight, of plagiarism, of heavy-handed manipulation of smaller companies, and of plain laziness. Detractors assert that Microsoft has lost whatever attraction it might have had, both as a company and as an entity; they are clunky, unimaginative, and boring, much like their products.
Conditions are ripe for a change, and Apple, with its current reputation and credibility, appears to be the agent that can bring about this change. After all, who better than the inventors of the iPod to rejuvenate the phthisic computer industry?
Not quite, or at least not yet. Apple has its own failings that may vitiate whatever momentum it has gained in the recent past, failings that are representative of Apple's attitude as a whole. These are not issues that can be glossed over at a moment's notice, or dismissed as irrelevant; as Apple begins to sell more products, they will obtrude upon its progress significantly.
Among these issues, the most pertinent is one of cost. A Macbook (Apple's bestselling laptop brand) is today almost twice as expensive as a Windows machine with the same hardware configuration, while not offering much more in terms of reliability or support; their customer service packages are uniformly unaffordable; and even relatively mundane products such as mices and earphones are pricey beyond reason. High costs scare away prospective buyers with little money to spend, and performance-conscious ones as well.
Also, while Apple's operating systems don't seem to be crippled by viruses and spyware in the same way that Microsoft's are, there is nothing inherently more secure about them. Kevin Finisterre, founder of a computer security firm called Digital Munition, became a celebrity of sorts in the computer world when he claimed that he would expose one security flaw in Tiger (the most recent avatar of Apple's many operating systems) every day in January 2007 -- and succeeded. It is only a matter of time, he says, before viruses are written for the Mac. Meanwhile, customers are lulled into a false sense of security by Apple's glib dismissals of viruses on their websites and in their advertisements ("114,000 viruses? Not on a Mac.").
Which brings us to their ad campaign. Apple have always been acutely aware of their giant competitor, and have used confrontational strategies in most of their ads to bring about awareness of their own products. Now, however, they seem to have stepped up the self-congratulatory feel a notch, with their new Mac-PC ads, which feature an aging, obese and cynical man as a metaphor for Microsoft while depicting Apple as a hip twenty-something youth, derogatorily commiserative in conversations with his counterpart. Though somewhat funny, these ads have polarized opinions of the Mac community in the past few months. Apple have always possessed an understated presumptuousness in their mien, but these ads have transformed that understatement into something much more overt and mean-spirited; at best, this is a miscalculation.
Apple have a significant advantage over Microsoft, entering the year; whether they emerge from it triumphantly or indifferently is only for them to decide.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Fantasy &c
Here's something I wrote long ago, but didn't complete. It makes for fair reading.
Fantasy novels have never been far from me. I started out with Tolkien, reading The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and, of course, The Lord of the Rings in quick succession over a period of a few weeks during which I didn't step out of the house or use more than three-word sentences to communicate with anyone. Near the end of Rings, I remember being confronted with the bleak certainty that the book would be over, and being overcome with emotion at the thought; I also remember the subtle dread that I felt the next day, the dread of facing a world now shorn of whatever wonder it possessed previously. I declared to my mother that day, with all the zeal of the convert, that I didn't care about Hinduism anymore, and that my religion was the religion of Tolkien.
These feelings were always close to the surface. Although I read indiscriminately, I kept returning to fantasy novels with the sort of regularity that indicated that I was hooked . First it was the Robert Jordan series, which seemed like the next logical step after Tolkien -- books one and two intrigued me, but I realized after book three that it was not going to be anywhere close to Tolkien, and put it down. (I suppose people will tell you that Tolkien is the best introduction to fantasy that you can ever get, but I disagree; I think one must start modestly, with such pedestrian fare as The Wheel of Time series, and progress, by degrees, to epics like The Silmarillion or Rings. Doing it the other way around is bound to lead to an anti-climactic experience).
After Robert Jordan, I picked up Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. This with some reluctance,because I didn't want to have the same opinion of King as I did of Jordan, being a long time fan. I knew what it felt like to be let down by an author's works -- in 2002 (or so) I remember actively loathing Michael Crichton's shameless attempt to further his views on global warming in his novel, A State of Fear. Was this the same person who had written such redoubtable science fiction as Jurassic Park, and The Andromeda Strain? Was this the same guy whose books I had read over and over again as a science-fiction crazed teenager? It was like losing an old friend.
But King did not disappoint at all. Quite the contrary: Dark Tower was a complete departure from anything I had ever read before, in fantasy or otherwise. The protagonists were as real as you or I, and as fragile; you always got the feeling that it wouldn't take much to kill them. Enemies were many, and in many different forms, and apparently a lot more resilient than our heroes. There were strangers introduced arbitrarily, strangers whose function was not clear. And the world itself was more than sufficiently fantastic to provide a dynamic all its own. The combination led to the development of an almost unbearable tension, a tension, that, if I was a movie reviewer, would call "edge-of-the-seat", and "exhilarating". At the risk of blaspheming, I would say that Dark Tower was more interesting and more nuanced than Rings, and (to me, at least) more entertaining.
Of course, most fantasy aficionados would chuckle mildly at this, and pat me indulgently on the back. Indeed, one of my good friends, who is an F.A if I ever knew one, told me that he and his online friends get together and have little fantasy appreciation sessions where they bash (among others) Stephen King and his fantastic creations.
I can't sympathize with this point of view, but (to an extent) I empathize. When you become a connoisseur of a genre like fantasy, nothing but the very best will do, and sometimes not even that. I react in much the same way when I watch an bad movie, or read a badly written book. There is always a tendency to be as exclusive as your tastes will provide, and once you have elevated yourself, there is no coming back down.
Or is there? A fantasy writer called Scott Bakker, in this interview, provides a fresh viewpoint on criticism. He holds that there are as many readers eager for new material as there are ones who find comfort in familiarity. Expounding, he also says that the solution is not to provide two different kinds of fiction for each of these groups (which, according to him, defeats the point), but to try and incorporate both familiarity and originality in the same work.
A little background on Mr. Bakker - he's actually Dr. Bakker, having obtained his doctoral degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and after twenty years of tooling around with his fantastic characters, has now built a house (three houses, to be precise) of words around them. His "high" fantasy trilogy is entitled The Prince of Nothing, and consists of the books The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior Prophet, and The Thousandfold Thought.
When I found out about this guy about two days ago, I was struck by an impulse to purchase his books. Here, I thought, was a person who knew what he was doing. A PhD in philosophy meant that he could probably contextualize, and very well at that, and the articulation of his thoughts (in the interview) convinced me that I would do well to put money in his pocket. Two days later (today),I bought The Darkness That Comes Before.
********************************************************************
And so ended that particular train of thought. I thought publishing this would be vaguely relevant because it is now some five months later, and in that time I've tried reading Darkness three times, and failed thrice -- the writing is uncompromisingly underwhelming. I guess the interview promised too much.
Fantasy novels have never been far from me. I started out with Tolkien, reading The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and, of course, The Lord of the Rings in quick succession over a period of a few weeks during which I didn't step out of the house or use more than three-word sentences to communicate with anyone. Near the end of Rings, I remember being confronted with the bleak certainty that the book would be over, and being overcome with emotion at the thought; I also remember the subtle dread that I felt the next day, the dread of facing a world now shorn of whatever wonder it possessed previously. I declared to my mother that day, with all the zeal of the convert, that I didn't care about Hinduism anymore, and that my religion was the religion of Tolkien.
These feelings were always close to the surface. Although I read indiscriminately, I kept returning to fantasy novels with the sort of regularity that indicated that I was hooked . First it was the Robert Jordan series, which seemed like the next logical step after Tolkien -- books one and two intrigued me, but I realized after book three that it was not going to be anywhere close to Tolkien, and put it down. (I suppose people will tell you that Tolkien is the best introduction to fantasy that you can ever get, but I disagree; I think one must start modestly, with such pedestrian fare as The Wheel of Time series, and progress, by degrees, to epics like The Silmarillion or Rings. Doing it the other way around is bound to lead to an anti-climactic experience).
After Robert Jordan, I picked up Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. This with some reluctance,because I didn't want to have the same opinion of King as I did of Jordan, being a long time fan. I knew what it felt like to be let down by an author's works -- in 2002 (or so) I remember actively loathing Michael Crichton's shameless attempt to further his views on global warming in his novel, A State of Fear. Was this the same person who had written such redoubtable science fiction as Jurassic Park, and The Andromeda Strain? Was this the same guy whose books I had read over and over again as a science-fiction crazed teenager? It was like losing an old friend.
But King did not disappoint at all. Quite the contrary: Dark Tower was a complete departure from anything I had ever read before, in fantasy or otherwise. The protagonists were as real as you or I, and as fragile; you always got the feeling that it wouldn't take much to kill them. Enemies were many, and in many different forms, and apparently a lot more resilient than our heroes. There were strangers introduced arbitrarily, strangers whose function was not clear. And the world itself was more than sufficiently fantastic to provide a dynamic all its own. The combination led to the development of an almost unbearable tension, a tension, that, if I was a movie reviewer, would call "edge-of-the-seat", and "exhilarating". At the risk of blaspheming, I would say that Dark Tower was more interesting and more nuanced than Rings, and (to me, at least) more entertaining.
Of course, most fantasy aficionados would chuckle mildly at this, and pat me indulgently on the back. Indeed, one of my good friends, who is an F.A if I ever knew one, told me that he and his online friends get together and have little fantasy appreciation sessions where they bash (among others) Stephen King and his fantastic creations.
I can't sympathize with this point of view, but (to an extent) I empathize. When you become a connoisseur of a genre like fantasy, nothing but the very best will do, and sometimes not even that. I react in much the same way when I watch an bad movie, or read a badly written book. There is always a tendency to be as exclusive as your tastes will provide, and once you have elevated yourself, there is no coming back down.
Or is there? A fantasy writer called Scott Bakker, in this interview, provides a fresh viewpoint on criticism. He holds that there are as many readers eager for new material as there are ones who find comfort in familiarity. Expounding, he also says that the solution is not to provide two different kinds of fiction for each of these groups (which, according to him, defeats the point), but to try and incorporate both familiarity and originality in the same work.
A little background on Mr. Bakker - he's actually Dr. Bakker, having obtained his doctoral degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and after twenty years of tooling around with his fantastic characters, has now built a house (three houses, to be precise) of words around them. His "high" fantasy trilogy is entitled The Prince of Nothing, and consists of the books The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior Prophet, and The Thousandfold Thought.
When I found out about this guy about two days ago, I was struck by an impulse to purchase his books. Here, I thought, was a person who knew what he was doing. A PhD in philosophy meant that he could probably contextualize, and very well at that, and the articulation of his thoughts (in the interview) convinced me that I would do well to put money in his pocket. Two days later (today),I bought The Darkness That Comes Before.
********************************************************************
And so ended that particular train of thought. I thought publishing this would be vaguely relevant because it is now some five months later, and in that time I've tried reading Darkness three times, and failed thrice -- the writing is uncompromisingly underwhelming. I guess the interview promised too much.
Monday, August 6, 2007
The Sea, by John Banville
Just finished reading The Sea, by John Banville -- not a dry eye in the house, to be sure. The prose is unfettered and pithy, the scenes are startling in their proximity, and the characters, though uniformly detestable, are real. A book that will stay with me for a long time.
I just want to say something about the book here -- it is apparently very verbose. I say 'apparently' because I didn't find it verbose at all; that is to say, I found it verbose, but not in a pejorative way. To quote just one example of what others in the internet community object to, I will reproduce these (my favorite) lines from the book --
In order to appreciate these lines, it is of course necessary to know the meaning of words like 'apotropaic', and 'polyglot'; it would also be useful to know that 'Tod' is a German verb that means 'to record the death of'.
Of course, all this is beyond the average blogger, who, while railing at the Booker Prize committee for having made such a deplorable decision in the summer of 2005, decides to call it the "worst Booker Prize winning novel ever", a designation that seems to me particularly misguided, especially since it is incumbent -- some would say -- upon art appreciation people in general and novel reviewers in particular not to pass all-encompassing judgments. In any case, I can speak for (at least) myself when I say that it is one of the most rewarding novels that I have ever read.
PS: Just realized that Books of the Year is filling up nearly as quickly as Books I've Read; apparently I have a tendency to be inclusive rather than exclusive in my decision-making process. In any event, I can say with no lack of generality that all the books I've read this year have been at least moderately good, with most in the very good category, and as such I recommend all of them.
I just want to say something about the book here -- it is apparently very verbose. I say 'apparently' because I didn't find it verbose at all; that is to say, I found it verbose, but not in a pejorative way. To quote just one example of what others in the internet community object to, I will reproduce these (my favorite) lines from the book --
The consultant's name was Mr Todd. This can only be considered a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate. It could have been worse. There is a name De'Ath, with that fancy medial capital and apotropaic apostrophe which fool no one.
In order to appreciate these lines, it is of course necessary to know the meaning of words like 'apotropaic', and 'polyglot'; it would also be useful to know that 'Tod' is a German verb that means 'to record the death of'.
Of course, all this is beyond the average blogger, who, while railing at the Booker Prize committee for having made such a deplorable decision in the summer of 2005, decides to call it the "worst Booker Prize winning novel ever", a designation that seems to me particularly misguided, especially since it is incumbent -- some would say -- upon art appreciation people in general and novel reviewers in particular not to pass all-encompassing judgments. In any case, I can speak for (at least) myself when I say that it is one of the most rewarding novels that I have ever read.
PS: Just realized that Books of the Year is filling up nearly as quickly as Books I've Read; apparently I have a tendency to be inclusive rather than exclusive in my decision-making process. In any event, I can say with no lack of generality that all the books I've read this year have been at least moderately good, with most in the very good category, and as such I recommend all of them.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Eulogy
Beyond the vain pretentiousness of the bourgeois and the sleepwalking cynicism of the workaday live a mass of people, giant-like in their understatedness, who emerge from the urban gloaming to reveal themselves briefly, and, like the lambency of a flashlight under a blanket, illuminate us the ordinary from the inside out. They are human, these creations of a higher power, but do not possess identifiable human characteristics, being (for example) unable to feel baser emotions such as guilt or envy. They are proud, but not crippled by pride; they are self-assured, but unable to patronize. They will tell you about themselves and their achievements with a sympathetic smile on their faces, and a song on the tips of their tongues; this last not because they are condescending, but because they are, for want of a better word, of a fuller, more fraught adjective, happy.
These people twinkle -- not in the pedestrian manner of stars, but ephemerally and with more inherence, like mica on sweltering asphalt -- with the force of their own love for life and the energetic manner in which they choose to lead it, lending to us as they do some of their effulgence, leaving us blinded but joyous.
Until 12 AM today, these people lived only in the remotest regions of my imagination; now their existence is bolstered by the assenting nod of reality.
These people twinkle -- not in the pedestrian manner of stars, but ephemerally and with more inherence, like mica on sweltering asphalt -- with the force of their own love for life and the energetic manner in which they choose to lead it, lending to us as they do some of their effulgence, leaving us blinded but joyous.
Until 12 AM today, these people lived only in the remotest regions of my imagination; now their existence is bolstered by the assenting nod of reality.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
A review of the Harry Potter series of books
I finished the last Harry Potter book today in a haze of speed-reading. Receiving it from a sullen postal worker at about 1:30 pm, I began with a dubious grin on my face and a light feeling in my heart. I arose from my (very warm) chair about five hours or so later, with feelings that were instantly recognizable. I observed that almost everything that I had previously thought of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, or anything else even vaguely connected with the series, needed examination in a new context. The scales, as they say, had begun to descend.
Before I tell you anything more about the book, I want to make a confession -- I am the most overbearing literary snob there is. My book list typically consists of only Booker Prize winning or nominated novels, or (at the very most) such other paragons of literary excellence as are recommended to me by similar snobs. As such, I tend to take writing seriously, and nothing that anyone writes is worth anything to me unless they write well. Those who cannot, I summarily reject. Also, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I cannot abide translations.
Accompanying this rather heavy-handed attitude is a strong dislike towards the bestselling novel. The only thing worse than a novel badly written is a novel badly written that sells a million copies. To people who ask me of examples of such aberrations, I will excitedly reel out, after a flood of self-conscious eloquence, the following names -- 1) The Da Vinci Code 2) Five Point Someone 3) The Harry Potter series.
After today's reading marathon,however, the last item will grace the above list no more.
Not that the book itself was startlingly revelatory, content-wise. There is no change in style or tone; nothing happens that has not already been anticipated. No characters undergo unforeseen reversals, and nothing really earth-shattering ever happens. In fact, one might even, after reading the novel, conclude that it is a fairly ordinary one, and has nothing within it that recommends itself to readers new to the phenomenon that is Harry Potter.
Which is why I liked it so much. It has been a long journey for Ms.Rowling, but she has emerged from it unscathed and unaltered. She has not, in these past few years, compromised her artistic integrity by, say, changing her characters in order to make them more likeable or (worse) more abominable. She hasn't abandoned her examination of the angst-ridden urban teenager, which has always been a pervasive theme. Most importantly -- and this is something that only becomes apparent towards the end of the seventh book -- she hasn't lost sight of the bigger picture.
That last quality, I think, is what appeals the most. After years of reading of subplots in which conspiracies hinted at and motives rendered obscure, it is a relief to find it all resolved in a way that is both satisfying and compelling. It is not easy to write a series of seven fantasy novels and keep track of all your minor characters and their raison d'êtres; it is harder to do so when they are being subjected to the scrutiny of the entire world. Ms.Rowling has pulled off an admirable coup.
I think it's misleading to criticize this novel, or the ones that came before it; it is important to keep in mind that the intentions of the author were always to write a series of novels for children, a series of novels in which wonderful things happen to ordinary people, and should be judged in that context only. To try and compare her to James Joyce or even James Thurber (as one critic famously did) is self-defeating, like trying to compare The Usual Suspects to Rashomon.
Novels are held together by two opposing elements -- the plot, which continually attempts to propel the reader onward to the next page, and the observation of details, that keep the reader engaged and assure him of things such as the fundamental humanity of the characters. "Thrillers" (for example) abandon the latter comprehensively and render themselves vacuous in the process, whereas most literature abandons the former, and renders itself incomprehensible to a majority of readers. Good novels attempt a judicious mixture of both. The Harry Potter series belongs firmly to this last, most excellent category.
Before I tell you anything more about the book, I want to make a confession -- I am the most overbearing literary snob there is. My book list typically consists of only Booker Prize winning or nominated novels, or (at the very most) such other paragons of literary excellence as are recommended to me by similar snobs. As such, I tend to take writing seriously, and nothing that anyone writes is worth anything to me unless they write well. Those who cannot, I summarily reject. Also, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I cannot abide translations.
Accompanying this rather heavy-handed attitude is a strong dislike towards the bestselling novel. The only thing worse than a novel badly written is a novel badly written that sells a million copies. To people who ask me of examples of such aberrations, I will excitedly reel out, after a flood of self-conscious eloquence, the following names -- 1) The Da Vinci Code 2) Five Point Someone 3) The Harry Potter series.
After today's reading marathon,however, the last item will grace the above list no more.
Not that the book itself was startlingly revelatory, content-wise. There is no change in style or tone; nothing happens that has not already been anticipated. No characters undergo unforeseen reversals, and nothing really earth-shattering ever happens. In fact, one might even, after reading the novel, conclude that it is a fairly ordinary one, and has nothing within it that recommends itself to readers new to the phenomenon that is Harry Potter.
Which is why I liked it so much. It has been a long journey for Ms.Rowling, but she has emerged from it unscathed and unaltered. She has not, in these past few years, compromised her artistic integrity by, say, changing her characters in order to make them more likeable or (worse) more abominable. She hasn't abandoned her examination of the angst-ridden urban teenager, which has always been a pervasive theme. Most importantly -- and this is something that only becomes apparent towards the end of the seventh book -- she hasn't lost sight of the bigger picture.
That last quality, I think, is what appeals the most. After years of reading of subplots in which conspiracies hinted at and motives rendered obscure, it is a relief to find it all resolved in a way that is both satisfying and compelling. It is not easy to write a series of seven fantasy novels and keep track of all your minor characters and their raison d'êtres; it is harder to do so when they are being subjected to the scrutiny of the entire world. Ms.Rowling has pulled off an admirable coup.
I think it's misleading to criticize this novel, or the ones that came before it; it is important to keep in mind that the intentions of the author were always to write a series of novels for children, a series of novels in which wonderful things happen to ordinary people, and should be judged in that context only. To try and compare her to James Joyce or even James Thurber (as one critic famously did) is self-defeating, like trying to compare The Usual Suspects to Rashomon.
Novels are held together by two opposing elements -- the plot, which continually attempts to propel the reader onward to the next page, and the observation of details, that keep the reader engaged and assure him of things such as the fundamental humanity of the characters. "Thrillers" (for example) abandon the latter comprehensively and render themselves vacuous in the process, whereas most literature abandons the former, and renders itself incomprehensible to a majority of readers. Good novels attempt a judicious mixture of both. The Harry Potter series belongs firmly to this last, most excellent category.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Death poems and guitar strings
Here are some Japanese poems, written by their poets at the time of their death --
On a complete side issue, I've spent--
a) the last week grading my students' exams
b) the last two days writing code, and,
c) the last five hours replacing my guitar's strings.
All of the above have frustrated me in roughly equal measure (I'm reminded of the quote/limerick -- "Problems worthy of attack/prove their worth by fighting back"), but I'm happy to report that I won in the end. Hah!
Bitter winds of winter --
but later, river willow,
open up your buds.
Pampas grass, now dry,
once bent this way
and that.
Inhale, exhale
Forward, back
Living, dying:
Arrows, let flown each to each
Meet midway and slice
The void in aimless flight --
Thus I return to the source.
On a complete side issue, I've spent--
a) the last week grading my students' exams
b) the last two days writing code, and,
c) the last five hours replacing my guitar's strings.
All of the above have frustrated me in roughly equal measure (I'm reminded of the quote/limerick -- "Problems worthy of attack/prove their worth by fighting back"), but I'm happy to report that I won in the end. Hah!
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Drip machine
What I told myself in September, when I "saw" the U.S for the first time --
1) Great country.
2) Doesn't know the first thing about coffee.
It was true. Their "French Roast" was quinine, only more expensive. Their "bold Colombian" boldly excited all the wrong tastebuds. And I couldn't begin understand how anyone could drink those infinitely bitter espressos, those concoctions of pure decoction. To a tongue weaned on Nescafe/Bru/Adigas philter coffee, all these Amriki coffees tasted... bad. In fact, my dislike was intense enough that I had begun to idly compare India to America on the basis of their respective coffee making skills; needless to say, India was coming out on top.
But coffee-wise my tastes have about-turned, thanks to a few months of Starbucks and JP's Java. I have gone from reviling American coffee to grudgingly acknowledging its merits in the wake-me-up department to extolling its virtues to other Bru-fans, all in about two months. In fact, it's come far enough that people have begun to look at me askance. Even before I left India, my shorts-wearing hair-growing rock-listening guitar-playing American-book reading tendencies were being subjected to some mild censure and being attributed to the "western-influence" endemic to urban adolescents in India, and now that I have gone so far as to change my taste in coffee, my people give me looks of resigned vindication. They say-your subjugation is complete.
All I can tell them in reassurance is that I don't like baseball more than I don't like cricket, and burgers will never replace rasam and curds with rice.
1) Great country.
2) Doesn't know the first thing about coffee.
It was true. Their "French Roast" was quinine, only more expensive. Their "bold Colombian" boldly excited all the wrong tastebuds. And I couldn't begin understand how anyone could drink those infinitely bitter espressos, those concoctions of pure decoction. To a tongue weaned on Nescafe/Bru/Adigas philter coffee, all these Amriki coffees tasted... bad. In fact, my dislike was intense enough that I had begun to idly compare India to America on the basis of their respective coffee making skills; needless to say, India was coming out on top.
But coffee-wise my tastes have about-turned, thanks to a few months of Starbucks and JP's Java. I have gone from reviling American coffee to grudgingly acknowledging its merits in the wake-me-up department to extolling its virtues to other Bru-fans, all in about two months. In fact, it's come far enough that people have begun to look at me askance. Even before I left India, my shorts-wearing hair-growing rock-listening guitar-playing American-book reading tendencies were being subjected to some mild censure and being attributed to the "western-influence" endemic to urban adolescents in India, and now that I have gone so far as to change my taste in coffee, my people give me looks of resigned vindication. They say-your subjugation is complete.
All I can tell them in reassurance is that I don't like baseball more than I don't like cricket, and burgers will never replace rasam and curds with rice.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
A short history of my relationship with translations
My visit to a new city is usually accompanied by a visit to a local bookstore, which in turn is usually accompanied by a book purchase. My stay in Houston this weekend was no exception, when myself and an old friend went to this uptown bookshop for a quick browse. Now I had Haruki Murakami on my mind when I entered the place -- I had heard much about him from Amazon and other such erudite sources -- and when I saw Kafka on the Shore in the bargain section, I picked it up without much hesitation. I did not know at the time that Mr.Murakami was a Japanese writer writing in Japanese -- in my naivete, I had thought of him as another Kazuo Ishiguro, only better. The book I had bought was a translation.
I was eighteen when I first attempted to read a translation -- I had picked up The Godfather excitedly, having heard much about it from everyone I knew. However, about a quarter of my way through the first ten pages, I was confronted with an velleity to stop reading, and, a few minutes later, I had already returned the book to its dusty corner in my rotating bookshelf, feeling, as I did, vaguely puzzled. Here was a critically acclaimed book that had been turned into an even more (if possible) critically acclaimed movie; a colossus that bestrode the literary world with hubris; a book to which all of us, according to one critic at least, apparently owed something -- and I hadn't liked it. Clearly this must signify some sort of personal flaw -- after all, most others couldn't get enough of it, and seemed to put it before any others they may have read. It was only much later did I come to know that Mario Puzo, the author, had written the book in Italian, and that it had been translated into English by some worthy who clearly paid more attention to the story than the style he imparted to it.
Since then, I have found a similar intolerance within me for books "translated into the English". The Name of the Rose. Doctor Zhivago. The Bhagavad Gita. It did not matter how important the book, or how high its reputation; if the author was not a native speaker, I would not buy it.
Or, at least, that was my resolve until three days ago, when I purchased Kafka on the Shore by accident. Now I am stuck with a book that is sure to disappoint in at least one category, and it remains to be seen whether it will make up for this shortcoming by excelling in others. Until then, I wait with breath bated and lips tightly pursed.
I was eighteen when I first attempted to read a translation -- I had picked up The Godfather excitedly, having heard much about it from everyone I knew. However, about a quarter of my way through the first ten pages, I was confronted with an velleity to stop reading, and, a few minutes later, I had already returned the book to its dusty corner in my rotating bookshelf, feeling, as I did, vaguely puzzled. Here was a critically acclaimed book that had been turned into an even more (if possible) critically acclaimed movie; a colossus that bestrode the literary world with hubris; a book to which all of us, according to one critic at least, apparently owed something -- and I hadn't liked it. Clearly this must signify some sort of personal flaw -- after all, most others couldn't get enough of it, and seemed to put it before any others they may have read. It was only much later did I come to know that Mario Puzo, the author, had written the book in Italian, and that it had been translated into English by some worthy who clearly paid more attention to the story than the style he imparted to it.
Since then, I have found a similar intolerance within me for books "translated into the English". The Name of the Rose. Doctor Zhivago. The Bhagavad Gita. It did not matter how important the book, or how high its reputation; if the author was not a native speaker, I would not buy it.
Or, at least, that was my resolve until three days ago, when I purchased Kafka on the Shore by accident. Now I am stuck with a book that is sure to disappoint in at least one category, and it remains to be seen whether it will make up for this shortcoming by excelling in others. Until then, I wait with breath bated and lips tightly pursed.
Monday, June 25, 2007
The problem with words
My gym visits are usually uneventful, but yesterday was a whole other story. Yesterday I met A, a journalism major, who seemed to share my thoughts on most important issues concerning writing.
Like me, A has written a book about the human condition -- it is sixty-five-thousand words long, and like mine, it too doesn't have a title that its author likes. Like me, she is terrified by the prospect of publisher rejection -- she can't bring herself to be judged by a bunch of "faceless people more interested in marketing an idea instead of publishing literature" . And her book, like mine, has been read by about four people.
That I felt an intense, life-affirming gratification at meeting an insecure writer like myself is fairly obvious. I've spent the last year, on & off, agonizing about things like mediocrity and rejection; I've thought about whether I should let more people read my book, or whether it was a mistake to give it even to one person; and I've read it so many times that I can reel off entire passages from memory. In short, I've lost all perspective on my sole work of art (there, I said it), and so you can imagine how cheered I was when I met another person like me.
The high point of the conversation, though, was our discussion on the nature of sentences -- we were both of the opinion that sentences can be about either themselves or about their subject. An example of a sentence that is about itself can be read in the "About" page of this blog (actually, this blog is littered with sentences like this) --"An exercise in style, this blog abandons most conventional approaches to populism, preferring instead to dissemble its intentions beneath a veil of heavy-handed pseudo-intellectual verbosity and imperfectly thought out semi-ideas; in so doing, it kicks much ass."
That sentence is three things -- long, verbose, and self-indulgent. The untrained reader might impatiently exclaim that it uses "big words" and is "empty"; a more appropriate adjective would be "cloying".
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have sentences that are about something (other than themselves). For eg (from my post on Austin live music):"I’d been with my friend to this little pub/restaurant on sixth street, one of those places that has the TV muted to ESPN baseball and the muzak playing Sinatra."This sentence puts a picture in your head without using too many adjectives. In itself, it may be of little use, but many such sentences line up to make up the bulk of modern literature. Typically, such sentences contain similes and metaphors, and use adjectives as tools instead of crutches; they are, in some sense, better than their self-indulgent counterparts.
But they aren't all bad. For me, it is always a pleasure to be able to use 'risible' in place of 'laughable', and 'gravid' in place of 'full of', not because they're 'big words' but because they're more appropriate. Writing is always about using the right words, and adjectives usually need to be more right than most other kinds of words. Writers need to know their adjectives well so as to use them appropriately.
We decided, though, that no serious writer can afford to keep his love for the abstruse sentence and still flourish. A worst case scenario might be a page-long paragraph populated with three sentences full of adjectives describing other adjectives that describe still other adjectives; a paragraph that loses sight of its subject, preferring to deal with its own pseudo-pulchritude instead; a paragraph that causes the reader to throw down the book in a fit of annoyance. Such writing, we agreed, is mostly self-defeating.
Inside, however, I still feel a deep affection for convoluted adjectival prose. It might be self-defeating and narcissistic, a garish display of verbal might; it might stand for nothing more than itself; and less, it might serve to deter all those who approach it with an open mind; but for me, it will always remain fun, both to read and write.
Like me, A has written a book about the human condition -- it is sixty-five-thousand words long, and like mine, it too doesn't have a title that its author likes. Like me, she is terrified by the prospect of publisher rejection -- she can't bring herself to be judged by a bunch of "faceless people more interested in marketing an idea instead of publishing literature" . And her book, like mine, has been read by about four people.
That I felt an intense, life-affirming gratification at meeting an insecure writer like myself is fairly obvious. I've spent the last year, on & off, agonizing about things like mediocrity and rejection; I've thought about whether I should let more people read my book, or whether it was a mistake to give it even to one person; and I've read it so many times that I can reel off entire passages from memory. In short, I've lost all perspective on my sole work of art (there, I said it), and so you can imagine how cheered I was when I met another person like me.
The high point of the conversation, though, was our discussion on the nature of sentences -- we were both of the opinion that sentences can be about either themselves or about their subject. An example of a sentence that is about itself can be read in the "About" page of this blog (actually, this blog is littered with sentences like this) --"An exercise in style, this blog abandons most conventional approaches to populism, preferring instead to dissemble its intentions beneath a veil of heavy-handed pseudo-intellectual verbosity and imperfectly thought out semi-ideas; in so doing, it kicks much ass."
That sentence is three things -- long, verbose, and self-indulgent. The untrained reader might impatiently exclaim that it uses "big words" and is "empty"; a more appropriate adjective would be "cloying".
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have sentences that are about something (other than themselves). For eg (from my post on Austin live music):"I’d been with my friend to this little pub/restaurant on sixth street, one of those places that has the TV muted to ESPN baseball and the muzak playing Sinatra."This sentence puts a picture in your head without using too many adjectives. In itself, it may be of little use, but many such sentences line up to make up the bulk of modern literature. Typically, such sentences contain similes and metaphors, and use adjectives as tools instead of crutches; they are, in some sense, better than their self-indulgent counterparts.
But they aren't all bad. For me, it is always a pleasure to be able to use 'risible' in place of 'laughable', and 'gravid' in place of 'full of', not because they're 'big words' but because they're more appropriate. Writing is always about using the right words, and adjectives usually need to be more right than most other kinds of words. Writers need to know their adjectives well so as to use them appropriately.
We decided, though, that no serious writer can afford to keep his love for the abstruse sentence and still flourish. A worst case scenario might be a page-long paragraph populated with three sentences full of adjectives describing other adjectives that describe still other adjectives; a paragraph that loses sight of its subject, preferring to deal with its own pseudo-pulchritude instead; a paragraph that causes the reader to throw down the book in a fit of annoyance. Such writing, we agreed, is mostly self-defeating.
Inside, however, I still feel a deep affection for convoluted adjectival prose. It might be self-defeating and narcissistic, a garish display of verbal might; it might stand for nothing more than itself; and less, it might serve to deter all those who approach it with an open mind; but for me, it will always remain fun, both to read and write.
Apple's decadence
What's wrong with Apple nowadays?
First it was all those smug ads, depicting the PC as an effete, self-deprecatory, middle-aged man who aspired to compete with someone far younger and "cooler" than himself. These ads, launched late last year, got away with metaphorical murder, highlighting superficial weaknesses in Windows machines while poking gentle and unsophisticated fun at the infinitely risible conglomerate that is Microsoft.
Then the iPhone, introduced in Macworld in January. Complicated in design, bulky in appearance, and crammed to the brim with redundant features, it represented everything that was wrong about today's mobile phones. Apple seemed to have abandoned its time tested keep-it-simple model to join the "more is merrier" school of thought.
And now Safari 3 for Windows, whose decrepitude can only be described by a medium that some say is worth a thousand words.
If Apple cannot rescue their reputation quickly, I might have to give away my Macbook in shame.
First it was all those smug ads, depicting the PC as an effete, self-deprecatory, middle-aged man who aspired to compete with someone far younger and "cooler" than himself. These ads, launched late last year, got away with metaphorical murder, highlighting superficial weaknesses in Windows machines while poking gentle and unsophisticated fun at the infinitely risible conglomerate that is Microsoft.
Then the iPhone, introduced in Macworld in January. Complicated in design, bulky in appearance, and crammed to the brim with redundant features, it represented everything that was wrong about today's mobile phones. Apple seemed to have abandoned its time tested keep-it-simple model to join the "more is merrier" school of thought.
And now Safari 3 for Windows, whose decrepitude can only be described by a medium that some say is worth a thousand words.
If Apple cannot rescue their reputation quickly, I might have to give away my Macbook in shame.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
Austin live music
Here's the deal with live music in Austin -
1) There's a whole lot of it.
2) It's uniformly awesome.
For eg. - I'd been with my friend to this little pub/restaurant on sixth street, one of those places that has the TV muted to ESPN baseball and the muzak playing Sinatra. It was a fairly quiet place, by bar standards -- ideal for two graduate student teetotalers to sip Dr.Pepper while observing the many pretty waitresses. You will then understand our (mild) surprise at five hefty Irishmen in suits who emerged from a side door and took up, respectively, a violin, a pair of TAMAs, a capoed acoustic guitar, and a bass, and began playing a curious (but infinitely jaw-dropping) mixture of (insert genre here) and (insert another totally different unheard of sub-sub-genre here).
Or -- two months ago. The place -- University Avenue and Dean Keeton. The time -- very late. The instruments -- A guitar through a Boss GT-8, a bass, drums, and a theremin. The band -- four people of undetermined sex wearing ponytails and bovine masks. The lighting -- functional. The girl next to me -- tattooed and drunk. The music -- bloody brilliant.
Even the buskers are hopelessly talented. One of them, Ed, says hi to me every-time I pass by him (which is very often; Chipotle and Ed are practically neighbors). He says he learnt guitar from his dad, who lives in Tennessee. When I asked him why he was on the street selling his music to unwilling pedestrians, he murmured something about his artistic vision being "compromised by dilettantes", and resumed playing Segovia on his Taylor.
Who are these people, and why are they all in Austin, Texas?
1) There's a whole lot of it.
2) It's uniformly awesome.
For eg. - I'd been with my friend to this little pub/restaurant on sixth street, one of those places that has the TV muted to ESPN baseball and the muzak playing Sinatra. It was a fairly quiet place, by bar standards -- ideal for two graduate student teetotalers to sip Dr.Pepper while observing the many pretty waitresses. You will then understand our (mild) surprise at five hefty Irishmen in suits who emerged from a side door and took up, respectively, a violin, a pair of TAMAs, a capoed acoustic guitar, and a bass, and began playing a curious (but infinitely jaw-dropping) mixture of (insert genre here) and (insert another totally different unheard of sub-sub-genre here).
Or -- two months ago. The place -- University Avenue and Dean Keeton. The time -- very late. The instruments -- A guitar through a Boss GT-8, a bass, drums, and a theremin. The band -- four people of undetermined sex wearing ponytails and bovine masks. The lighting -- functional. The girl next to me -- tattooed and drunk. The music -- bloody brilliant.
Even the buskers are hopelessly talented. One of them, Ed, says hi to me every-time I pass by him (which is very often; Chipotle and Ed are practically neighbors). He says he learnt guitar from his dad, who lives in Tennessee. When I asked him why he was on the street selling his music to unwilling pedestrians, he murmured something about his artistic vision being "compromised by dilettantes", and resumed playing Segovia on his Taylor.
Who are these people, and why are they all in Austin, Texas?
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Philosophy for the masses
At the urging of many, I have begun to read Ayn Rand. Praise for her work (among my friends) has been pretty much unanimous, as have their reactions to my not having read any of it ("You haven't read Ayn Rand!", "You haven't read Ayn Rand?","You haven't read Ayn Rand?" and more in the same vein). I decided to take the plunge, therefore, and bought The Fountainhead.
It has been disappointing so far (150 pages). Characters are stereotypical, seemingly possessing little depth. The prose is uninspiring. The plot is predictable. And, because I know enough about Randian philosophy (such as it is), I know exactly what will happen to each one of these characters at the end of the book. It is one thing to read something in the nature of a traditional hero-villain yarn and know that the characters we like will, beyond the slightest doubt, rout the ones that we loath; it is quite another to be confronted with a similar situation when the yarn in question is supposed to be a "hymn in praise of the individual", and appears to be one of the mainstays of modern thought.
It all boils down to this -- can a philosophy be insightful and profound while simultaneously appealing to attention starved TV watchers around the world? My guess is no. Answers to most questions worth asking are subjective, depending not only on the individual asking the questions but also the context in which the questions are asked. In fact, even after being provided a context and an individual, most answers only lead to more questions. It is incumbent upon the individual in question to develop a philosophy based on his answers to questions; philosophies that establish absolutes, philosophies such as Rand's, are extremely unlikely to help him.
A philosophy for the masses is at best an ersatz one.
It has been disappointing so far (150 pages). Characters are stereotypical, seemingly possessing little depth. The prose is uninspiring. The plot is predictable. And, because I know enough about Randian philosophy (such as it is), I know exactly what will happen to each one of these characters at the end of the book. It is one thing to read something in the nature of a traditional hero-villain yarn and know that the characters we like will, beyond the slightest doubt, rout the ones that we loath; it is quite another to be confronted with a similar situation when the yarn in question is supposed to be a "hymn in praise of the individual", and appears to be one of the mainstays of modern thought.
It all boils down to this -- can a philosophy be insightful and profound while simultaneously appealing to attention starved TV watchers around the world? My guess is no. Answers to most questions worth asking are subjective, depending not only on the individual asking the questions but also the context in which the questions are asked. In fact, even after being provided a context and an individual, most answers only lead to more questions. It is incumbent upon the individual in question to develop a philosophy based on his answers to questions; philosophies that establish absolutes, philosophies such as Rand's, are extremely unlikely to help him.
A philosophy for the masses is at best an ersatz one.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
The things I like to do when I'm bored
1) Indulge myself. Consume multiple meals in short spans of time, drink many cans of Coke (or Pepsi or Barg's or Dr.Pepper), stuff a whole pound of coconut cake into my mouth, and use chips as an excuse to shovel down sour cream or ranch sauce or jam or butter.
2) Sleep for as much as twelve consecutive hours.
3) Use the internet as a tool for voyeurism. Read about Anna Nicole's favorite primary colo(u)rs, find out what Manu Ginobili didn't have for lunch on Tuesday, add ungrammatical comments to Barack Obama's latest video on Youtube, and understand the mechanism by which Britney Spears loses her next strand of hair.
4) Watch all three seasons of House, M.D. while simultaneously figuring out how Toxoplasmosis is an opportunistic infection, and how meningoencephalitis leads to photophobia.
5) Repeat 1 through 4 until all higher brain functions have been completely disrupted.
2) Sleep for as much as twelve consecutive hours.
3) Use the internet as a tool for voyeurism. Read about Anna Nicole's favorite primary colo(u)rs, find out what Manu Ginobili didn't have for lunch on Tuesday, add ungrammatical comments to Barack Obama's latest video on Youtube, and understand the mechanism by which Britney Spears loses her next strand of hair.
4) Watch all three seasons of House, M.D. while simultaneously figuring out how Toxoplasmosis is an opportunistic infection, and how meningoencephalitis leads to photophobia.
5) Repeat 1 through 4 until all higher brain functions have been completely disrupted.
Monday, April 30, 2007
The cruelest month...
Songs/videos in bad taste - almost every hip-hop song made between 2002 and 2007.
Songs about bad taste -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3J0F_Dgq9I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj9swNR5-lY
Can you tell the difference?
(Warning: Not for easily shocked parents. Please avert your eyes if under-aged or born before 1960).
Songs about bad taste -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3J0F_Dgq9I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj9swNR5-lY
Can you tell the difference?
(Warning: Not for easily shocked parents. Please avert your eyes if under-aged or born before 1960).
Friday, April 27, 2007
The mud flowers of dialect...
Two poems by Seamus Heaney...
Song
A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens
Casualty
He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman's quick eye
And turned observant back.
Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.
But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.
II
It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.
But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.
He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe's complicity?
'Now, you're supposed to be
An educated man,'
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.'
III
I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse...
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond...
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Many things...
Been a long couple of weeks, and I haven't been able to even look at my blog, let alone actually contribute to it. Indeed, as I write this, I'm about eight hours short of my week's quota of sleep, with at least six of those eight coming from yesterday's abortive attempt to 'go to bed'. This is my twenty-sixth consecutive hour of wakefulness.
My rushed state of being did not prevent me from 'observing' my birthday. The verb is exact -- I watched my birthday pass by from a safe distance, as if it carried with it something catching. It was anticlimactic, April 4th -- I didn't do anything but run non-linear simulations as people called me from various longitudes (to wish me, of course).
Not that I regret it. Birthdays are inevitable, and hence not special. What deserves to be celebrated is strength of character, or the prevalence of sense in a world that is increasingly turning away from it. No, really. I'm convinced that we're headed towards societal self-destruction.
Not for the obvious reasons. I will not quote the proliferation of nuclear weapons, for example, or the...
------------------------------------------------------
(A week later)
I'm not making excuses again, and indeed there can be nothing that excuses the inability to finish writing a blog post. I'm not writing Edwin Drood, for God's sake.
Anyway, I can't remember the reasoning that led to my meditations on the nature of society in the previous paragraphs, so I'm going to have to let it go. I will admit to feeling a little irked at this sort of self-imposed interruption -- I'm not used to having my nascent thoughts being put out by "the diurnal dynamics of student life".
And so I will turn to the Virginia Tech massacre, which has disturbed me beyond reason. In the past couple of days I've read everything I can about it, and I now know more about gun laws in the southern United States (and specifically Texas) than the average international student. I have also gotten my hands on specific 'literature' written by the perpetrator in question, and examined it at length, if a little breathlessly.
A few thoughts on the latter -- apparently Cho Seung-hoi, the gunman, was an undergraduate student in English, and had made a few attempts over the years to 'write' -- as of course, literature students must. His writings will be examined by millions nationwide, in the feeble hope of deconstructing this man piece by piece; the people who will read will be primarily those who would like to know what kind of a person he was,and what his motives were. I will not do the same thing.
Instead, I will examine here his writing, which is feeble at best, and not worthy of being pronounced as even an attempt at literature. It is shoddy, ungrammatical in many places, and is fraught with spelling errors.
Consider this line, for example, on the very first page of his 'play', Richard McBeef --
"Come on John. We need to have man-to-man talk."
No prizes for spotting the error. On the next page, we have this paragon of grammatical excellence --
"Richard gently rests him hand on John's lap."
and this--
"...you can get into my mom's pant!"
These are not the only transgressions. The entire play smacks of a lack of attention-span, and consists of little else but swearing and physical violence. There is no attempt at establishing depth of character, no endeavor to create even the tiniest smidgen of context. It is very badly written prose.
My point is this -- if this guy was no good at English, his major, then why was he allowed to continue? Why even put him under the impression that he was worthy of obtaining a degree from Virginia Tech (of all places)? Why didn't they just expel him for incompetence?
These are especially relevant questions. If they had in fact fired him, or flunked him out, then maybe he wouldn't have shot so many people. Maybe he would have just gone back to his home in west Virginia, sulked for a little while, and then become an engineer or something. By allowing incompetence to continue with impunity, the professors at the department of English at Virginia Tech have to take at least partial responsibility for his presence on campus, and (by proxy) his behavior.
But let us not "play the blame-game" here. I bet that there is no one reading this who has not, at one time or another, tolerated to a similar extent incompetence in himself, or in others. The former especially. How many times have you cut yourself a large portion of slack? How many times have you made excuses for yourself, your behavior, your performance? How many times have you told yourself that "it's alright"?
I thought so. And maybe there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it's our way of dealing with failure. Maybe it's our way of telling ourselves that we matter in this world. But at the same time, there should be a conscious effort at improvement, a concerted attempt at catharsis, a considered stab at betterment. Otherwise we become hollow shells caught in the nowhere between self-deprecation and hope, abject and imperfect representations of our true selves. And maybe when these things happen,maybe when we have within us only a mere shadow of ourselves, going on a shooting spree will begin to seem more...interesting.
Let us, then, for the sake of all the people around us, expect nothing but the best from ourselves. Let us hold our heads high and walk with an urgency that reflects our desire to excel, to rectify, to reach the truth. Let us finish our days as we start them -- with a smile on our faces, and the knowledge that we have come a long way, but still have a long way to go.
Let us uplift ourselves.
My rushed state of being did not prevent me from 'observing' my birthday. The verb is exact -- I watched my birthday pass by from a safe distance, as if it carried with it something catching. It was anticlimactic, April 4th -- I didn't do anything but run non-linear simulations as people called me from various longitudes (to wish me, of course).
Not that I regret it. Birthdays are inevitable, and hence not special. What deserves to be celebrated is strength of character, or the prevalence of sense in a world that is increasingly turning away from it. No, really. I'm convinced that we're headed towards societal self-destruction.
Not for the obvious reasons. I will not quote the proliferation of nuclear weapons, for example, or the...
------------------------------------------------------
(A week later)
I'm not making excuses again, and indeed there can be nothing that excuses the inability to finish writing a blog post. I'm not writing Edwin Drood, for God's sake.
Anyway, I can't remember the reasoning that led to my meditations on the nature of society in the previous paragraphs, so I'm going to have to let it go. I will admit to feeling a little irked at this sort of self-imposed interruption -- I'm not used to having my nascent thoughts being put out by "the diurnal dynamics of student life".
And so I will turn to the Virginia Tech massacre, which has disturbed me beyond reason. In the past couple of days I've read everything I can about it, and I now know more about gun laws in the southern United States (and specifically Texas) than the average international student. I have also gotten my hands on specific 'literature' written by the perpetrator in question, and examined it at length, if a little breathlessly.
A few thoughts on the latter -- apparently Cho Seung-hoi, the gunman, was an undergraduate student in English, and had made a few attempts over the years to 'write' -- as of course, literature students must. His writings will be examined by millions nationwide, in the feeble hope of deconstructing this man piece by piece; the people who will read will be primarily those who would like to know what kind of a person he was,and what his motives were. I will not do the same thing.
Instead, I will examine here his writing, which is feeble at best, and not worthy of being pronounced as even an attempt at literature. It is shoddy, ungrammatical in many places, and is fraught with spelling errors.
Consider this line, for example, on the very first page of his 'play', Richard McBeef --
"Come on John. We need to have man-to-man talk."
No prizes for spotting the error. On the next page, we have this paragon of grammatical excellence --
"Richard gently rests him hand on John's lap."
and this--
"...you can get into my mom's pant!"
These are not the only transgressions. The entire play smacks of a lack of attention-span, and consists of little else but swearing and physical violence. There is no attempt at establishing depth of character, no endeavor to create even the tiniest smidgen of context. It is very badly written prose.
My point is this -- if this guy was no good at English, his major, then why was he allowed to continue? Why even put him under the impression that he was worthy of obtaining a degree from Virginia Tech (of all places)? Why didn't they just expel him for incompetence?
These are especially relevant questions. If they had in fact fired him, or flunked him out, then maybe he wouldn't have shot so many people. Maybe he would have just gone back to his home in west Virginia, sulked for a little while, and then become an engineer or something. By allowing incompetence to continue with impunity, the professors at the department of English at Virginia Tech have to take at least partial responsibility for his presence on campus, and (by proxy) his behavior.
But let us not "play the blame-game" here. I bet that there is no one reading this who has not, at one time or another, tolerated to a similar extent incompetence in himself, or in others. The former especially. How many times have you cut yourself a large portion of slack? How many times have you made excuses for yourself, your behavior, your performance? How many times have you told yourself that "it's alright"?
I thought so. And maybe there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it's our way of dealing with failure. Maybe it's our way of telling ourselves that we matter in this world. But at the same time, there should be a conscious effort at improvement, a concerted attempt at catharsis, a considered stab at betterment. Otherwise we become hollow shells caught in the nowhere between self-deprecation and hope, abject and imperfect representations of our true selves. And maybe when these things happen,maybe when we have within us only a mere shadow of ourselves, going on a shooting spree will begin to seem more...interesting.
Let us, then, for the sake of all the people around us, expect nothing but the best from ourselves. Let us hold our heads high and walk with an urgency that reflects our desire to excel, to rectify, to reach the truth. Let us finish our days as we start them -- with a smile on our faces, and the knowledge that we have come a long way, but still have a long way to go.
Let us uplift ourselves.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Something to chew on
"Better is the enemy of good."
PS: I apologize for the recent dearth of posts on this blog. I can no longer truthfully attribute the latter to laziness, as I did a few weeks ago. I have indeed become extremely busy, what with an exam coming up tomorrow and another a week from now, as well as a project due immediately after that. I'll be back to my energetic self in a little bit, though; so never fear.
PPS: Switchfoot rock (the verb does agree with its subject - I'm using Switchfoot here in the plural. Therefore, Metallica rock, and so do Aerosmith, but, on the other hand, Britney Spears sucks.)!
PS: I apologize for the recent dearth of posts on this blog. I can no longer truthfully attribute the latter to laziness, as I did a few weeks ago. I have indeed become extremely busy, what with an exam coming up tomorrow and another a week from now, as well as a project due immediately after that. I'll be back to my energetic self in a little bit, though; so never fear.
PPS: Switchfoot rock (the verb does agree with its subject - I'm using Switchfoot here in the plural. Therefore, Metallica rock, and so do Aerosmith, but, on the other hand, Britney Spears sucks.)!
Monday, March 26, 2007
Friday, March 23, 2007
Something I found exceedingly interesting...
...if a trifle inaccessible. The article assumes a basic knowledge of quantum mechanics and its inherently indeterministic nature.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Dissecting disgust
A friend recently observed that the contents of this blog were mostly rants. He seemed to think (quite justifiably) that this signified that my view of the world was a morose one, populated with conspiracy theories and people with malicious/naive/disingenuous intentions, and admitting not one single shred of hope. He went on to observe (correctly) that such viewpoints were unhealthy and could not lead to places other than ones populated with grief and discontent.
To my shock, I found myself agreeing with every piece of logic that he put forth to further his argument. He seemed to be proving, right before my eyes, that I was fundamentally an unhappy person because of my scathingly critical outlook towards everything that was around me. If other people took a pinch of salt with their daily news, I supplied a bucketful. I epitomized, to him (and, for a scary few hours, to myself), the stereotypically discontent critic that fought everything that was presented before him quite strenuously.
But something in the argument did not quite latch on, wasn't quite right. I was capable of finding joy, and indeed in the most mundane of occurrences; in, for example a squirrel munching diffidently on a peanut or two, or in a man playing the most brilliant jazz solos on his saxophone (I am thinking here of my excursion to Berkeley, CA in the beginning of this year. It was about 7:30 in the evening, and I had just gotten off BART(Bay Area Rapid Transit), and was earnestly attempting to push my way through the crowd to catch my first glimpse of Berkeley, the liberal stronghold I had read so much about. And there he was, on Shattuck and University, just beside the signal, unselfconsciously playing the most beautiful saxophone music that I had ever heard. No, it was more than that, more than beauty; it instilled in me an immense hope for us, for the human race, for if we were capable still of being so utterly confident of ourselves, of infecting our own kind with such confidence, then surely nothing was beyond us.)
So I knew I wasn't incapable of joy. So why all these rants? Why discontentment at such a 'young age'(as he put it)?
I think it's because it is easier to rant. The roots of disgust lie within rationality and logic, and as such can be articulated exactly. My reactions to a bad movie, for example, follow from quick analysis - I find a one here, a one there, and a two hidden somewhere, and add them up to make four. There isn't much room for emotional intervention; I can be detached, cold, even, and write my sentences with the confidence of a person who is about to disapprove.
Joy, however, does not admit of such shoddy treatment. It demands an involvement of sentiment and feeling that precludes automatically any attempt at objective analysis. More importantly, the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts - meaning that the feeling of joy is imbued with an intangible something that elevates it above the mere summation of its components; no analysis can decompose it. The same can in fact be said of all true emotions, emotions like grief, laughter and empathy.
So it was with some relief that I concluded that I had not yet descended into cynicism, which I believe should be guarded against most vigorously. Yes, we must preserve our sense of wonder, for it is what propels us into the next day, into the next hour, into the next minute; yes, we must possess the ability to be cheered by acts of human kindness, and goodwill; and indeed we must try to root our ideologies in a foundation of trust and decency. But it is also true that we must protect ourselves from the untruths that exist to deceive us into false emotional submission and transform us into petty shadows of timorous character. We can only be strong if we preserve in ourselves a breed of healthy skepticism, fueled occasionally by the adorable squirrel or virtuosic saxophonist; we are otherwise reduced to a mere sum of our own ineffectual parts.
To my shock, I found myself agreeing with every piece of logic that he put forth to further his argument. He seemed to be proving, right before my eyes, that I was fundamentally an unhappy person because of my scathingly critical outlook towards everything that was around me. If other people took a pinch of salt with their daily news, I supplied a bucketful. I epitomized, to him (and, for a scary few hours, to myself), the stereotypically discontent critic that fought everything that was presented before him quite strenuously.
But something in the argument did not quite latch on, wasn't quite right. I was capable of finding joy, and indeed in the most mundane of occurrences; in, for example a squirrel munching diffidently on a peanut or two, or in a man playing the most brilliant jazz solos on his saxophone (I am thinking here of my excursion to Berkeley, CA in the beginning of this year. It was about 7:30 in the evening, and I had just gotten off BART(Bay Area Rapid Transit), and was earnestly attempting to push my way through the crowd to catch my first glimpse of Berkeley, the liberal stronghold I had read so much about. And there he was, on Shattuck and University, just beside the signal, unselfconsciously playing the most beautiful saxophone music that I had ever heard. No, it was more than that, more than beauty; it instilled in me an immense hope for us, for the human race, for if we were capable still of being so utterly confident of ourselves, of infecting our own kind with such confidence, then surely nothing was beyond us.)
So I knew I wasn't incapable of joy. So why all these rants? Why discontentment at such a 'young age'(as he put it)?
I think it's because it is easier to rant. The roots of disgust lie within rationality and logic, and as such can be articulated exactly. My reactions to a bad movie, for example, follow from quick analysis - I find a one here, a one there, and a two hidden somewhere, and add them up to make four. There isn't much room for emotional intervention; I can be detached, cold, even, and write my sentences with the confidence of a person who is about to disapprove.
Joy, however, does not admit of such shoddy treatment. It demands an involvement of sentiment and feeling that precludes automatically any attempt at objective analysis. More importantly, the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts - meaning that the feeling of joy is imbued with an intangible something that elevates it above the mere summation of its components; no analysis can decompose it. The same can in fact be said of all true emotions, emotions like grief, laughter and empathy.
So it was with some relief that I concluded that I had not yet descended into cynicism, which I believe should be guarded against most vigorously. Yes, we must preserve our sense of wonder, for it is what propels us into the next day, into the next hour, into the next minute; yes, we must possess the ability to be cheered by acts of human kindness, and goodwill; and indeed we must try to root our ideologies in a foundation of trust and decency. But it is also true that we must protect ourselves from the untruths that exist to deceive us into false emotional submission and transform us into petty shadows of timorous character. We can only be strong if we preserve in ourselves a breed of healthy skepticism, fueled occasionally by the adorable squirrel or virtuosic saxophonist; we are otherwise reduced to a mere sum of our own ineffectual parts.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
I'd like to say...
...that I've been busy.
That I've been working out. That I've been to Houston. That I've been examining my novel in the bleak hope of redeeming it.
That I'm currently reading a bunch of books (three, to be exact. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, and The Angel of Darkness, by Caleb Carr.).
That I've been cooking food for my roommates. That I've been participating in an entrepreneurship competition that hopes to discover a new generation of social emancipators. That I've been on the phone a dozen times in the past week, trying to get through to Apple Care, spelling my incredibly long and unwieldy eight syllable name out to all the different people I've spoken to.
And when I tell you these things, you might nod your head sagely. You might say, Ah, I see why you aren't as active on your blog as you were the previous month. You might sympathize, thinking that I am busier than I used to be, and that this is a perfectly legitimate reason for the lack of blog posts on this page.
But you would be mistaken, because even though I seem very occupied, I'm no more so than I was a month ago. A graduate student such as myself must expect to be busy, and learn to deal with it at a very basic level. Days will be crowded, nights packed. The mind expects to be occupied all the time, even when it is about to go to sleep and wakes up from it.
No, the reason for this blog's temporal barrenness can be traced directly to the lethargy of its author.
That I've been working out. That I've been to Houston. That I've been examining my novel in the bleak hope of redeeming it.
That I'm currently reading a bunch of books (three, to be exact. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, and The Angel of Darkness, by Caleb Carr.).
That I've been cooking food for my roommates. That I've been participating in an entrepreneurship competition that hopes to discover a new generation of social emancipators. That I've been on the phone a dozen times in the past week, trying to get through to Apple Care, spelling my incredibly long and unwieldy eight syllable name out to all the different people I've spoken to.
And when I tell you these things, you might nod your head sagely. You might say, Ah, I see why you aren't as active on your blog as you were the previous month. You might sympathize, thinking that I am busier than I used to be, and that this is a perfectly legitimate reason for the lack of blog posts on this page.
But you would be mistaken, because even though I seem very occupied, I'm no more so than I was a month ago. A graduate student such as myself must expect to be busy, and learn to deal with it at a very basic level. Days will be crowded, nights packed. The mind expects to be occupied all the time, even when it is about to go to sleep and wakes up from it.
No, the reason for this blog's temporal barrenness can be traced directly to the lethargy of its author.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
A self-deprecatory review of the 79th Annual Academy Awards
And so it is that Martin Scorsese has won his first Oscar.
Deservedly, no doubt. I watched The Departed on the day of my last exam, bleary eyed from lack of sleep and roommate internecine, and the movie was remarkable enough to hold my incredibly fatigued mind's attention. (When I left the theater, a haze of images were floating in and out of my vision, mixing themselves liberally with reality; my sphincter had decided to loosen itself a tad; and the bus-stop, a mile and a half from where I stood, seemed an unattainable goal. When I finally got home, an hour and fifty-five minutes later, I simultaneously needed to empty my bowels and drop down dead. How I managed both is a secret I will divulge only upon threat of torture; know, however, that I slept the sleep of the deeply drugged that night, waking only about a day later. )
So definitely a movie to think about, and applaud. So let us pause for a moment to do exactly that.
(Pause pause pause pause)
(Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause)
Okay, now that the applause has stopped, what of his achievement? Should we talk about it? Should we talk about how he has been ignored by the Academy these past five hundred and thirty one years? Should we assert that all his movies deserved to win and five hundred and thirty two years later, only one of them has? Should we posit that now, having won for the first time(which, as grandmothers will no doubt tell you, is the hardest), he will continue to win until his grandchildren are dead?
Nah. And I'll tell you why. Because it would be hackneyed to make those observations. Everyone is talking about Marty and his statuette right now, all across the internet. To add to that would be less than boring.
Instead, I will tell you a little story.
I don't have TV. I can't afford the costs, of course, but more importantly, I can't afford the time. I have taken three serious graduate courses this semester, and none of them have anything even remotely to do with TV. Plus, I don't feel like watching any of the TV shows that are on nowadays; all they do is make me feel drowsy and inattentive.
I did want to watch the Oscars, though. I always do. Not because I care particularly about who's winning or losing, or because I like the innuendo, or even because of the cleavage density per square inch. No, I like to watch the Oscars because of Wikipedia.
Last year, when Paul Haggis won Best Screenplay for Crash, I was the first (only?) person to change his Wikipedia entry from "Academy-Award nominated" to "Academy Award winning". This year, I hoped to pull off a similar coup; eating my day's complement of butter with chips, with my guitar in the background waiting to be picked up, and Metallica playing 'Turn the Page'; this year I wanted to be the first one to compliment Helen Mirren, flatter Forest Whitaker, and most importantly, pay my respects to Martin Scorsese. And all this with the capable but ultimately flawed Mozilla Firefox for the Macintosh, with multiple "tabs" open, each one editing a separate Wikipedia entry.
But I was thwarted at every turn. Every time I went back to the edit history, I found out that my addition to the page was a tad too late, and hence worthless. It began with Alan Arkin (who(m) I've been a fan of ever since The Rocketeer and Glengarry Glen Ross), and as the day (night) progressed I missed Jennifer Hudson, Pan's Labyrinth, Michael Arndt and Happy Feet (though in my defense, the latter I never expected to win; I had the Wikipedia page for Cars open instead). I gave up after these defeats.
The problem, of course, was at least partially because I didn't have TV. With TV the broadcast is instantaneous, or maybe staggered only by a few seconds; when it comes to the internet, however, there is an extra lag that accounts for some poor guy like me hunched over a computer terminal, diet Coke in a coaster by his left hand, anxiously typing out the latest winner at 100 words per minute or less. What chance has he against the speed of light, or the speed of a Wikipedia junkie?
None, as it turned out. And so it was that butter ran out of chips, my guitar stayed where it was throughout the night, unplayed and abandoned,and Metallica had played 'Turn the Page' fifty-one-and-a-half times. A Pyrrhic defeat.
All this only goes to show that if you're serious about paying homage (how many in the audience know that 'homage' is pronounced 'omaaage'? I thought so.) to prospective first time Oscar winners by announcing their victories on Wikipedia, you should definitely have access to a TV with a decent cable connection.
Or maybe you should get on one of those sites that provide (il)legal access to the Oscar broadcast via the internet.
Or maybe you should find a better way to pay homage.
Or maybe, just maybe, you should find a more compelling pastime.
Deservedly, no doubt. I watched The Departed on the day of my last exam, bleary eyed from lack of sleep and roommate internecine, and the movie was remarkable enough to hold my incredibly fatigued mind's attention. (When I left the theater, a haze of images were floating in and out of my vision, mixing themselves liberally with reality; my sphincter had decided to loosen itself a tad; and the bus-stop, a mile and a half from where I stood, seemed an unattainable goal. When I finally got home, an hour and fifty-five minutes later, I simultaneously needed to empty my bowels and drop down dead. How I managed both is a secret I will divulge only upon threat of torture; know, however, that I slept the sleep of the deeply drugged that night, waking only about a day later. )
So definitely a movie to think about, and applaud. So let us pause for a moment to do exactly that.
(Pause pause pause pause)
(Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause)
Okay, now that the applause has stopped, what of his achievement? Should we talk about it? Should we talk about how he has been ignored by the Academy these past five hundred and thirty one years? Should we assert that all his movies deserved to win and five hundred and thirty two years later, only one of them has? Should we posit that now, having won for the first time(which, as grandmothers will no doubt tell you, is the hardest), he will continue to win until his grandchildren are dead?
Nah. And I'll tell you why. Because it would be hackneyed to make those observations. Everyone is talking about Marty and his statuette right now, all across the internet. To add to that would be less than boring.
Instead, I will tell you a little story.
I don't have TV. I can't afford the costs, of course, but more importantly, I can't afford the time. I have taken three serious graduate courses this semester, and none of them have anything even remotely to do with TV. Plus, I don't feel like watching any of the TV shows that are on nowadays; all they do is make me feel drowsy and inattentive.
I did want to watch the Oscars, though. I always do. Not because I care particularly about who's winning or losing, or because I like the innuendo, or even because of the cleavage density per square inch. No, I like to watch the Oscars because of Wikipedia.
Last year, when Paul Haggis won Best Screenplay for Crash, I was the first (only?) person to change his Wikipedia entry from "Academy-Award nominated" to "Academy Award winning". This year, I hoped to pull off a similar coup; eating my day's complement of butter with chips, with my guitar in the background waiting to be picked up, and Metallica playing 'Turn the Page'; this year I wanted to be the first one to compliment Helen Mirren, flatter Forest Whitaker, and most importantly, pay my respects to Martin Scorsese. And all this with the capable but ultimately flawed Mozilla Firefox for the Macintosh, with multiple "tabs" open, each one editing a separate Wikipedia entry.
But I was thwarted at every turn. Every time I went back to the edit history, I found out that my addition to the page was a tad too late, and hence worthless. It began with Alan Arkin (who(m) I've been a fan of ever since The Rocketeer and Glengarry Glen Ross), and as the day (night) progressed I missed Jennifer Hudson, Pan's Labyrinth, Michael Arndt and Happy Feet (though in my defense, the latter I never expected to win; I had the Wikipedia page for Cars open instead). I gave up after these defeats.
The problem, of course, was at least partially because I didn't have TV. With TV the broadcast is instantaneous, or maybe staggered only by a few seconds; when it comes to the internet, however, there is an extra lag that accounts for some poor guy like me hunched over a computer terminal, diet Coke in a coaster by his left hand, anxiously typing out the latest winner at 100 words per minute or less. What chance has he against the speed of light, or the speed of a Wikipedia junkie?
None, as it turned out. And so it was that butter ran out of chips, my guitar stayed where it was throughout the night, unplayed and abandoned,and Metallica had played 'Turn the Page' fifty-one-and-a-half times. A Pyrrhic defeat.
All this only goes to show that if you're serious about paying homage (how many in the audience know that 'homage' is pronounced 'omaaage'? I thought so.) to prospective first time Oscar winners by announcing their victories on Wikipedia, you should definitely have access to a TV with a decent cable connection.
Or maybe you should get on one of those sites that provide (il)legal access to the Oscar broadcast via the internet.
Or maybe you should find a better way to pay homage.
Or maybe, just maybe, you should find a more compelling pastime.
Friday, February 16, 2007
A book's pages...
...should have a pre-determined, standard thickness.
This is not an issue that can be shoved away at a moment's notice. Pages are what make up a book (a trite observation, but wait a moment),and if no one pays any attention to them, the people at large will stop reading books in the dystopian future I foresee.
For example, thick pages lend the book a false illusion of girth. Readers who look primarily for girth during purchase (of a book) will be inspired to new heights of cynicism; ah, they will think, what a cheap way of making a book look bigger than it really is. They will become wary and suspicious, and tend not to trust publishers (and hence the authors under their wing) who choose to descend to such murky depths of deception.
On the other hand, thin pages are subject to being torn in a moment of emotion: when our protagonist has just confronted his direst enemy; when he is being castrated by wild Rottweilers; when he is about to meet David Furnish. The torn page is an all too frequent casualty of frenzied reading, as any bookworm will testify.
The answer lies in standardization. Publishers should conduct experiments where they pay people to read. These experiments will teach them the "correct" value of the thickness of a page. In the meantime they can also feed and shelter the experimentees, who can do little else but read, read, and read some more.
People such as myself.
This is not an issue that can be shoved away at a moment's notice. Pages are what make up a book (a trite observation, but wait a moment),and if no one pays any attention to them, the people at large will stop reading books in the dystopian future I foresee.
For example, thick pages lend the book a false illusion of girth. Readers who look primarily for girth during purchase (of a book) will be inspired to new heights of cynicism; ah, they will think, what a cheap way of making a book look bigger than it really is. They will become wary and suspicious, and tend not to trust publishers (and hence the authors under their wing) who choose to descend to such murky depths of deception.
On the other hand, thin pages are subject to being torn in a moment of emotion: when our protagonist has just confronted his direst enemy; when he is being castrated by wild Rottweilers; when he is about to meet David Furnish. The torn page is an all too frequent casualty of frenzied reading, as any bookworm will testify.
The answer lies in standardization. Publishers should conduct experiments where they pay people to read. These experiments will teach them the "correct" value of the thickness of a page. In the meantime they can also feed and shelter the experimentees, who can do little else but read, read, and read some more.
People such as myself.
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