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.

Naseeruddin Shah...

...agrees with me.

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.

A letter to my uncle...

...written about four months ago. I present it here without comment.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20000818/REVIEWS/8180303/1023

A review of the movie 'The Cell' directed by another budding Indian Hollywood director, Tarsem Singh. He doesn't have as much hype surrounding him as Shyamalan, but he seems pretty good, at least going by what Ebert says (I haven't watched the movie myself).

I sent you this review because I thought it illustrated a point I was trying to make over the phone, about Indian movies degenerating into the sort of vapid nonsense that movies like 'Neal 'N Nikki', 'Kaliyug', 'Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon' exemplify. In the last lines of the review, Ebert asks ' Is it possible that the next infusion of creativity will come from cultures like India, still rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls?'

Too late, I say. If we weren't 'locked into malls' in 2000 (when the review was written) we certainly are now, and while there's nothing 'wrong' with that, it's still discouraging. Why haven't our filmmakers incorporated into our moviemaking the eclecticism that countries like Japan and Korea and China seem to routinely incorporate into theirs? Why can't they get out movies that handle our culture gracefully, and with pride? Why do we have to be subjected to the same 'boy meets girl' formula over and over again, which works about three times out of a hundred ( I use the word 'works' here in the sense of 'breaks even')?

I'll tell you why. (Yes, I'm going to answer all my rhetorical questions). It's because they're timid. They think that if they make one movie that requires more attention-span than the average movie-goer possesses, they will lose all their money and credibility. And they're right, they probably will. It's why more people have heard of Karan 'KANK' Johar than Nagesh Kukunoor.


If all this seems a bit abstract, take an example--Rang de Basanti. Critically acclaimed movie, great box office hit, all that. My problem with it - and this is something I can't get anyone to see, much less agree with - is that it's too easy. You have all these drunken inebriated assholes who suddenly take a 180 degree turn to face martyrdom because their friend died. 2+2 = 4. Get it? Except that in real life, it's *never* that easy. There's no way ordinary people can get themselves worked up enough to murder someone who may or may not have been responsible. You need more than a friend's death to be able to kill someone else with moral impunity.

And then there's the whole massacre thing in the end, which signifies--what, exactly? That we are a police state? That the media is stifled in our country? No one knows, but no one cares, because, hey, Aamir Khan is dying. Dead, already.

Whatever. Here's my theory on how this thing could have been written. The director, or scriptwriter, or whoever, says, 'Hey, I have this great idea. Aamir Khan dies in the end. Let's think of a good way to extract cheap emotion from the audience.' And a great story is born. The thing that infuriates me most is that people actually identified with the story, and 'got' it. Are we so disconnected with our emotions that we need to be told stories that make logical sense?

To an extent, I realize that all this is the natural course of things. I realize that mainstream media needs to sellout if it needs to sustain itself. I realize that many people go to the movies to be entertained, to be told what to feel. I realize that most people watch movies not expecting to make any significant emotional investment. What I do not realize, however, is why Bollywood (the name itself suggests a sellout of epic proportions. Hollywood was perhaps a wood of hollies before the 'h' was capitalized; but what in God's name is a 'Bolly'?) needs to sellout more than most other film industries in the world. It's more of a travesty because we have such a rich culture and so many untold stories that deserve telling, and so many stories that need a more impartial retelling.

Anyway, this email is dangerously close to becoming one of my self-righteous rants (maybe it already is one, so sue me), so I'll sign off here.

Me.

On Music

Something that I read in a book recently has held my subconscious too long to be ignored, and I knew I had to write about it when I discovered that I had something to say. (Actually, this may not be entirely true; I do feel strongly about the issue, but whether or not I have something to say will emerge in the following paragraphs.)

The author in question tried to compare writing in general and prose in particular, to music in all its forms. He postulated that prose is transparent, showing up the writer's imperfections. The nature of prose (he argued) is such that the creator cannot separate himself from his creation; his flawed stamp is visible on each of his offsprings.

Music, on the other hand, transcends the creator. The nature of music is such that it automatically distances itself from whoever wrote it; it is exalted, pure, an embodiment of the truth, existing in a vacuum and frustrating attempts to trace its genealogy.

This was the author's thesis, anyway. I remember reading this and agreeing with it almost immediately (a reaction that I later concluded signified a personal flaw). It was only later when I examined the components of this argument that I found that I took issue with most of the assumptions it made, that the argument itself was deeply inadequate, glib, even, and failed to hold any water under serious examination.

First of all, writing - we will all agree that writing is flawed, and for exactly the reasons listed above. So much has been said about this by so many people so much better at making arguments than I that it would border on impudence to try and add to them; if one needs a thorough primer on how exactly writing is flawed one can easily refer to the Zadie Smith article that I helpfully provided a link to in one of my previous posts.


But music, now; is it unsullied, incapable of adulteration? Does it not bear even a single trace of its creator's imperfections? Is it, in short, divine?

Music as come down to us, some say, from God, and hence is abstract, incapable of being annotated, analyzed, dissected into its component elements; it is a reflection of a being who is simultaneously all-powerful and compassionate. People who believe this about music will also diligently hold that Glenn Gould (who will show up later in these paragraphs) playing the Goldberg Variations cannot be duplicated by a computer hooked up to a piano. The human being is divinity personified when he plays such beautiful music; this divinity is not reflected, cannot be reflected, in something as banal as a procession of zeros and ones.

I used to subscribe to this point of view, but don't anymore; Music possesses a language, by which everything that is abstract about it can be reduced to an almost cabalistic symbolism. It is an incredibly efficient language, a language that enables the composer to separate himself from the sounds of his music, its very flesh, and concentrate on its creation. A language that does not correspond to the idea of most languages we know, a language that cannot be spoken, only understood, but a language all the same.

And because music can be described by a language, it is also subject to its various shortcomings. There is a dichotomy here; The same language that enables the perpetuation of music through the ages and ensures its immortality also imprisons it; a treble clef here, a C minor chord there, a few crochets everywhere, and look - there is Glenn Gould, in all his majesty. Or rather the computer, playing Glenn Gould. Can you tell the difference? Almost certainly not.

It follows that any music that is written can be flawed, and can carry with it all the quirks of the person that wrote it. Two examples immediately spring to my mind -

Glenn Gould, when once asked why he didn't play Mozart, chuckled a tiny bit and apparently said that his music was simple and derivative.

Joe Satriani, in this
interview, says of the song Hella Good (by No Doubt) - "They're in the wrong key, and that bugs me. They've got all this support from this great pool of talent, they've got all this money, everything is set up for them to do this right, and then you hear a vocal line singing a melody that doesn't mix with the chord progression."


These people are clearly making a point, though I can't really see it. I've listened to Hella Good dozens of times, but don't detect anything wrong . And Mozart? Who can dare call his music "simple", of all things?

People who know more about it than I do. And here is the epiphany, the moment of revelation, almost timid in its simplicity - we cannot perceive flaws in music because we understand it not at all. When a piece of music plays, we love it, but cannot hope to understand what is being said. Somewhere buried in the notes and the chord progressions is a true authorial reflection, but we, in our ignorance, cannot see it.

And perhaps this is just as well. Imagine a life where music is as commonplace and well understood as speech; imagine recognizing each musical cliché as it came your way; imagine hordes of effete critics, using all the literary tools at their disposal to annotate, interpret, and pummel into submission a work of flawed excellence.

We would have lost something indescribably beautiful because we strove, in all our innocence, to describe it.

Two paragraphs of inspired prose

No inspirations today. I tried writing a little bit, but discovered that there wasn't much meat to my topic, and reverted to reading instead.

These paragraphs are taken from two separate books by the same author, and I enclose them here not only because they were strangely uplifting (to me, at least), but also because they revealed the author's deep knowledge of musical excellence and its trappings.

Now it was the trombone again and a tangled, half suppressed crescendo that erupted at last into the melody's final statement, a blaring, carnivalesque tutti. But fatally unvaried. Clive put his face into his hands. He was right to have worried. It was ruined goods. Before he left for Manchester he had let the pages go as they were. There was no choice. Now he could not remember the exquisite change he had been about to make. This should have been the symphony's moment of triumphant assertion, the gathering up of all that was joyously human before the destruction that was about to come. But presented like this, as a simple fortissimo repetition, it was literal-minded bombast, it was bathos; less than that, it was a void; one that only revenge could fill.

Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

This restraint, this cool, suits the blues, or Theo's version of it. When he breaks on a medium paced standard like "Sweet Home Chicago", with its slouching dotted rhythm - he's said he's beginning to tire of these evergreen blues - he'll set off in the lower register with an easy muscular stride, like some sleek predatory creature, shuffling off tiredness, devouring miles of open savannah. Then he moves on up the fret and the diffidence begins to carry a hint of danger. A little syncopated stab on the turnaround, the sudden chop of an augmented chord, a note held against the tide of harmony, a judiciously flattened fifth, a seventh bent in sensuous microtones. Then a passing soulful dissonance. He has the rhythmic gift of upending expectation, a way of playing off triplets against two -or four -note clusters. His runs have the tilt and accent of bebop. It's a form of hypnosis, of effortless seduction. Henry has told no one, not even Rosalind, that there are moments, listening from the back of a West End bar, when the music thrills him, and in a state of exaltation he feels his pride in his son - inseparable from his pleasure in the music - as a constricting sensation in his chest, close to pain. It's difficult to breathe. At the heart of the blues is not melancholy, but a strange and worldly joy.

Ian McEwan, Saturday

The best books ever written

Have you heard of all five hundred and forty-four?

Well, I haven't. But I intend to read all of them before I die.

And I do mean all.

Vanity post

My beautiful guitar.

Can you guess the arpeggio?

The Waste Land

I enclose herein my six-month old review of The Waste Land, by T.S.Eliot.

For me, interpreting a poem is always a task fraught with fear; I'm always wondering if I'm ‘correctly’ reproducing the poet’s intentions. The assumption that one begins with when starting to read a poem is that the poet intends to convey something, some thought, some emotion. And while this is true, the vehicle of conveyance sometimes obscures the meaning so much so that the outcome may be unintelligible to anyone else reading it.

One need not despair, however; the beauty of the poem is that it can be interpreted in any way that the reader fancies, without any sort of reference to the original meaning (if indeed there is such a thing). A poem is special because the reader’s interpretation makes the poem personal to himself and himself alone.

Having said that, one needs to recognize that not all poems stand on their own, waiting to be interpreted by the next reader who comes along. Some are fairly abstruse in structure, others in meaning, still others in both. ‘The Waste Land’, an epic five-part surrealistic endeavor by T.S Eliot, belongs to the latter category.

Such poems need a bridge – a bridge that narrows the gap between the poet and the average reader, possessing an average attention span, with an average amount of time to spend edifying himself with poems written by Nobel Laureates. Annotations, if written responsibly and intelligently, can serve as this bridge, piercing through the fog that represents the poet’s emotions without adding any smoke to it. The best annotations are the ones that dole out information sparingly, but in the right places – compare them to a sightseer’s guide to a country that informs him about the places he must visit, but remains silent about the places he should avoid. Subjectivity must not be abandoned completely, to the disadvantage of the tyro, and yet must not be so overt as to preclude any sort of reader involvement.

‘The Waste Land’ is a perfect candidate for such an annotation - at first glance, it seems unreadable, possessing no rhyme, no apparent rhythm, and no obvious meaning; it appears to be a gratuitous foray into logorrhea. Indeed, my impulse, on reading the first ten or so lines, was to put it down immediately, and I was continually seized by these impulses throughout my first reading. The poem certainly did not relate a story, or at least did not sustain one, or have a common thread. It did not possess any continuity to speak of, except in places. There were strange onomatopoeic interludes that were jarring and unpleasant. The language kept changing, here in French, there in German, here again in English. It was, in short, one of the most irritating poems to read, at least for the first time.

However, it also possessed many attractions; lines stared out from the midst of unintelligible verse, lines gravid with meaning, as if isolated from the rest like lagoons in the midst of sandy beaches; its length indicated some sort of overall ‘plan’ – it was, after all, separated into five parts, and that must indicate structure, if fractured; there were at least five languages that I could identify, including German, French, and Sanskrit, and knowledge of these languages could only mean that the poet was a scholar. Best of all – and perhaps only fanatical readers such as myself can understand this – it was long. Four hundred and thirty three lines of blank verse, a veritable pillar of long-windedness, the ‘War and Peace’ of poetry, sat there smugly, challenging me to give it a full reading. And it was then that I knew that a different approach had to be adopted in tackling this literary monster.

And so I downloaded the Librivox recording of the thing. (Librivox, for those who do not know, is an audiobook website that contains recordings of works in the public domain, works whose copyright has expired. ‘The Waste Land’ is one of the few poems available on that website for download.)

I read the poem along with the recording, enunciating each line deeply, like some sort of mantra, and an hour and two consecutive readings later, a shadow had lifted partially and a vague form emerged from it. The meaning of it all, while far from clear, was now much more apparent than it was at any time in the past.

I will not attempt to provide a verse-by-verse interpretation, or even a part-by-part interpretation – such an endeavor would be naïve, not to mention verbose and utterly devoid of stimulation. Instead, I will skirt the edges, providing hints as to how to read it, without actually going through much of the poem itself.

One can find buried within the The Waste Land's Wikipedia page, a short poem by Ezra Pound; this poem was in fact an absurd commentary on the poem itself -- a meta-poem, if you will. Its last two lines read -

‘Or say that the upjut of sperm

Has rendered his sense pachyderm.’

Ribaldry aside, one can easily appreciate what he’s saying – a pachyderm is exactly what might have written the poem. Random words that were perhaps typed out by a million elephants on a million typewriters writing for a million years, he thought. However, it is precisely this quality of the poem that makes it intelligent, or, to refute Ezra Pound, not written by some lunatic with time hanging heavy on his hands. Consider, for example, the first two lines –

‘April is the cruelest month, breeding,

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing –,’

Now the traditional way to read this line would be to assume that the second statement follows the first statement, and is an explanation for it – that is, if one asks the question, ‘Why is April the cruelest month?’ then one could expect the answer to be contained within the next line. But the next line states that April breeds lilacs out of the dead land. Now, you wonder, how could this be a bad thing, how could this make April ‘cruel’? Is it because the poet does not like lilacs? Or does he consider it a cruel thing that lilacs could grow out of dead land? The answer, of course, is neither, because there is no answer – the second line is not in any way connected to the first line, except by its subject (April). The second line is self-contained, as is the third, the fourth, and so on. And that is a clue – the reader reads each line with a fresh mind, not knowing what to expect. At the same time, (and this is important) he focuses on visualizing the words in the lines that stand out (to him). This makes the poem a visual extravaganza like no other.

One must be careful, however, not to overdo this- there are places where the poet makes sense, and in these places the reader should pause and switch to a more traditional mode of reading.

So that, then, is the poem in its entirety – large episodes of intensely visual descriptions interspersed with relatively banal interludes into traditional ‘storytelling’. Which brings me to my final observation regarding the poem – what is a Waste Land -- or a wasteland -- but a vast open space, punctuated here, there, and everywhere with a heap of broken images, through which perhaps a river such as the Thames runs, where you could easily experience fear…in a handful of dust?

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land

What do...

...A.S Byatt, J.K.Rowling, M.J.Hyland and George Eliot have in common?

drum roll

They are all women authors.

Stranger than fiction

These thoughts have been chafing at me for some time now, so I'm going to try and write them out for clarity.

In the past few days I've come across three separate punchlines based on the familiar theme of truth being stranger than fiction. First, a movie, called "Stranger Than Fiction"; second, a blog, which I shall not name; third, in a book that I've been reading for the past few weeks now, trying unsuccessfully to finish it. Encountering the phrase in its various forms got me thinking about why exactly we perceive truth as being stranger than fiction. First impressions follow.

Throughout the history of civilization, we have been obsessed with finding answers. Language. Religion. Stories. The Industrial Revolution. Subjugation. Cellphones. Anna Nicole Smith (may she rest in peace). These were humankind's answers to various problems that faced it. Actually, they weren't really problems, because things are never that simple. Which is precisely my point, or going to be.

(I know I'm being a little incoherent here, and if the rest of the post turns out to be in the same vein, the world shall probably never see this. But I do have a point.)

We were sure that we needed answers, because, well - that's what we do. We answer questions. That is our prime-airy function. So when the question was posed to ourselves, by ourselves - how can we make our life better? Back came the answers, in a flood - Industries. English. Christianity. Thanksgiving. Communication.

But the question - how can we improve the quality of our lives? - was only ostensible. It was not (and is not) a real question because it did not admit of an objective answer. And so it is that Islam and Christianity are continually at each other, cell phones will render half the male population that use them sterile, and industries cause global warming and pollution. These cannot be answers to anything, least of all human comfort.


What, then, is the function of these answers? What are they good for? Here's what I think - they distract. These answers distract us from ourselves, to the point where a good fraction of us can bear our own company for no longer than a minute. Boredom settles in. Our attention span contracts, to the point where it is almost like a baby's. We fidget with the metaphorical pen on the collective desk of humanity. We want to watch TV, read a book, go outside, play the guitar, check out Youtube or MySpace, write a blog post. Do something. The point - and this is an important one - we do not know how to behave when we are with ourselves. We are puzzled when presented with our own personalities.

And all our answers, our Anna Nicoles and our Jenna Jamesons and our Salman Rushdies and our George Bushes, help us perpetuate this fantasy world we live in. We no longer have to waste time sitting all alone. We can use it in better ways. In more constructive ways.

And so, when the truth confronts us, thwacks us in the face with all its might, we do not know what to do. We cannot. Some of us cry, because we sense that the truth implicates us. Others turn away, in fear, maybe, or cowardice. Still others don't see what the big deal is about. Jeez, they say, in their own movies or TV shows, larger than life or smaller than it (but never the same size), get over it, man.

Truth is stranger to us (than fiction) because we are strangers to it.

Note to myself 1: I truly apologize for the fractured structure of the paragraphs.

Note to myself 2: The apology is not so that I can get off easy. I still take responsibility for "the fractured structure of the paragraphs", as I put it.

N.T.M. 3: Minimize the rhetorical questions.

Quotes for the (insert time span here)

"I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers' groups moonlight as support groups for people who think that writing is therapeutic.

The best, the only real training you can get is from reading other people's books."

"There's nothing more off-putting to a would-be novelist to hear (sic) about how so-and-so wakes up at four in the a.m, walks the dog, drinks three liters of black coffee and writes three thousand words a day..."

Thank you, Zadie Smith, for understanding.

An Observation

The power of an argument lies wholly within its medium of communication.

Pearl Jam's Black - DS-1 Settings

Have to jot this down before I forget -

Tone - 10 'o clock

Distortion - 7 'o clock

Level - 11-12 o'clock

It's perfect!

The responsibility of the adjective

I have an injured thumb today that might prevent me from writing a lot, but I had to put down these thoughts before they died out completely.

My friend and I were having this discussion the other day about prose and how it differs from poetry. I claimed that poetry, if written truthfully, is immune to criticism. You cannot call a poem 'less beautiful' than another one, at least not objectively (I assume that all criticism is objective). One poem may be more interesting to you than another one, but that is more a reflection of your individuality than the poem itself. This is, of course, assuming that the poem is not 'forced', and written truthfully and spontaneously. There are countless badly written poems out there, all of them the result of not having anything to write about. The 'poet', in this case, wrote the poem because he was in love with the idea of his having written a poem, not because he had anything to say.

Prose, on the other hand, is different, because in a sense everything is forced. The author cannot employ the language of everyday life to communicate his thoughts, and he has to think of newer and better ways to describe the same things. This is also what sets apart one author from another, and the good ones from the bad; the ability to put one's own spin on commonplace situations.

For example - Zadie Smith, in this beautiful article, says in one passage -

In each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence - a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same.

The first thing that strikes the author when he has to portray someone looking through their belongings is the phrase 'rummaged through purse'. The phrase is spontaneous, and not very helpful. "Everyone rummages through their purses, Ms.Smith," the editor might say. "What makes your rummage-er different?"

Even less helpful is the adjective 'beautiful', which I don't think any writer in his sane mind would use while describing a beautiful thing. The problem is that the reader doesn't know what to think when someone calls something beautiful. There are too many associations with the word - my campus is beautiful, my car is beautiful, my laptop is beautiful, my guitar is beautiful - which one of these do you mean, budding writer?

Which brings me to my point - the responsibility of the adjective. Adjectives were incorporated into languages when people needed to describe things to each other. What is wrong with this motorbike? It's dirty, clean it. How does the water taste? It tastes salty, drink it. How goes your practice? Crappy, I want to quit. And so on.

I imagine adjectives worked quite well in the beginning, when people were getting used to them. It empowered the literary bourgeois and enabled them to describe things and people and events with ease and eliminated the need to think up of similes or metaphors. It was, I imagine, like giving a car to a person who previously went around on foot, or like giving tractors to a farmer who previously plowed his fields on bull-back - liberating, but also lethargy inspiring. It is no coincidence that Zadie Smith calls this lazy writing.

So now the adjective, after years of being taken for granted by everyone and his dog, has been stripped of any power that it may have had before. Adjectives are now just words, meaningless and empty as shells, and cannot be used for much more than light chitchat.

The onus, therefore, has fallen back on the simile and the metaphor. In order to communicate his thoughts, the author has to liken them to something else. "You lie like a mattress," Neal Stephenson might say. "Thoughts arrive like butterflies," Eddie Vedder might say. In this way, individuality is preserved, and prose is rescued from a prosaic death.

And I argue that it will remain so. Similes and metaphors, unlike adjectives, are a faithful reflection of the writer's thoughts, spontaneous or otherwise; it is inconceivable that they will fail us like adjectives have. Consider the following passage, written some seventy years ago by F.Scott Fitzgerald, reproduced verbatim from another blog (which I shall not name).

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rose-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end, The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The simile and the metaphor, dear reader, will be alive long after we are all dead and buried.

Vladimir, Vladimir's son

The first thing I noticed about Vladimir Nabokov's wikipedia article was that his dad was also a Vladimir.

That's right. His name is Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov; the 'ovich' suffix, in Russian, means 'son of'.

He's not the only famous guy to be named after his father. Bill Gates is another example. Many kings, including King Louis and Ptolemy. Pope John Paul. Even a nondescript golfer called Davis Love (the third).

Here is my question - Why? Why this take this ineffectual avenue to perpetuate your name? Why succumb to such a failure of imagination? Why do unto your son as your father has done unto you?

Let sense prevail. Let sons be named differently from their fathers.

Blogger's editor...

....kinda sucks. I might shift to Wordpress before the day is done.

The first one

This is my very first blog entry, and tradition demands that I write a little bit about why this is my first post, why I'm such a late entrant; after all, one might think, blogs were invented a long time ago, and web-diaries were around before that. So why now? Why February 1st, 2007?

It's not entirely an irrelevant question. For this is the same person who, when asked his opinion of blogs by some other guy who must have had far too much time on his hands, railed against them in the most startling manner. They are too glib, he postulated. Smack of self-indulgence and whimsy, he proposed. Inspire uninteresting people to publish their tepid opinions before an all-accepting world, he argued. The thoroughness of his verbosity would have indicated an underlying cynicism to none but the most wary.

It's true; for the longest time, I detested blogs. Actively. I did my best to formulate negative opinions about each blog that I came across, opinions that I would later visit upon hapless friends and acquaintances.

It got a little old after a while. I began to think about my arguments against 'bloggery', (as I called it), and discovered that those arguments were superficial, at least for the most part.

Consider one of my objections above. 'Blogs smack of self-indulgence and whimsy', I used to say (I still like to say it because it's a nice little soundbite that scares away pro-bloggers). In fact, this, by my examination of the 'blogosphere', seems to be one of the primary reasons for the existence of a blog. Everyone has opinions, and now, with weblogs, can express them at a moment's notice.

But this is stupid (pejorative? Perhaps. Sue me.). Of course they're self-indulgent! Of course they're whimsical! That's the whole point, you more-on! Exhorting bloggers to be less self-indulgent is like exhorting a comedian to stop making jokes, or asking a dominatrix to be more submissive. If a raison d'être can ever be ascribed to something as obviously vast and diverse as the blogosphere, it would have to be the perpetuation of the self.

And I have nothing against such self-indulgence. In fact, this first post is arguably self-indulgent, and I have no doubt at all that the ones to follow will be equally so.

Does this make me a hypocrite? To a degree. The fact that I admit the truth here is encouraging, and at least a little cathartic (In fact, that is one of the tentative aims of this blog; to tell the truth).

So we agree that my primary reason for hating blogs was no reason at all. So did I hate blogs at all? Or was this prevarication rearing its equivocal head again?

No, it wasn't. I didn't like blogs, though the reason was not nearly as simple as I thought it might be. It took me a few years to understand it, but here is what I think it is -- I didn't (don't) like them because they're too...sell-outish.

Sorry, forced to coin a word there, but you know what I mean - they tend to cater to the masses. When people blog it seems like they're writing (at least partially)for an audience, and not for themselves. One can observe this sell-outishness (yes, I'm going to stick with the word) in most blogs fairly easily. For example - when people tell you what they're listening to, they're being sell-outish. When they're sending around memes, they're being sell-outish. When they put up little links of their friends blogs up on their websites, they're being sell-outish.

Maybe this is a little unclear, so let me define sell-outishness - it is the component of a blogger (or any creator of content, for that matter) which encourages him to write(create) with an audience in mind. Advertisement, in other words. When you advertise anything, or if you (knowingly) take part in an ad for yourself, you're being a sellout. A caterer.

And I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with that. Selling oneself is ineluctably intertwined with one's life. If you're a prospective employee, you have to sell yourself to the recruiter. If you're the recruiter, you have to sell your company (unless you're Google) to the employee. If you're a writer who has just finished writing his first book, you have to sell yourself to your agent (unless you're Zadie Smith, who was auctioned away to the highest bidder. Sniff.). Heck, even Steve Jobs had to sell the iPod concept before it became the cachet it currently is.

I recognize that all this is the natural course of things. In order to live, one must seek constant approval. But it's also true that there must be some part of you that is pristine, sincere, truth-seeking; and keeping an audience in mind when you write something makes it harder for yourself to stay truthful, because there's always someone else that you're aware of that changes what you write. Advertisement precludes sincerity and obfuscates the truth.

So I have decided that this blog shall exist in a vacuum. No one shall know of its existence, save perhaps two or three really close friends. I shall take or drop no names, and to keep things really truthful I shall keep my own name out of it. I will not cater or sellout; instead, I shall try to tell the truth, while I stand in uffish thought.