Dispatches from Zembla

Odd Man Out

2009-11-19T12:08:00.000-05:00

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out wasn't really a discovery for me since I anyway expected it to be great (being a huge fan of The Third Man) but it really exceeded all my expectations.

The film starts in the morning with Johnny (played by James Mason) and his gang of Irish revolutionaries planning on a bank robbery which goes wrong. The way the story is told it almost feels as if it takes place in real time, which in a way it does, since everything ends just before the midnight of the same day. The robbery goes wrong because Johnny has a nervous attack just before they plan to escape with the loot. The way everything is setup it becomes clear that his sudden nervous attack is not only because he has just come out of prison after spending six months inside but also because he has a conflicted conscience about terrorism and violence. (The opening title card of film even says that the film is not concerned with the Irish separatism or any such movement but rather solely about "the conflicts inside the heart of men"). Following a scuffle during the escape Johnny is shot and wounded and he shoots the policeman. When he later gains consciousness, the first thing he wants to know is whether the person who was shot was killed or not. When he is informed that yes he died, we see that he has suffered yet another wound, this time a moral and spiritual wound. From then on, it is all downhill for him, as he suffers both physically and spiritually and searches for salvation. It actually reminded me of Crime and Punishment.

There are a few sequences in the film which don't work as well as the rest of the film does. One sequence in particular towards the end of the film where a couple of secondary characters argue about immortality of soul and some such thing. Some of the scenes which shows Johnny's hallucinations also feel slightly high handed - sort of second hand and amateurish expressionism like the scene where Johnny quotes a line about "charity" from bible to what he thinks is the Priest himself. When he can't hear what the priest replies to him he rues if only they had all listened to him and not drowned his voice with their own debates and arguments.

Robert Krasker, the man behind The Third Man, Great Expectations and Brief Encounter also shot this film. The chiaroscuro effect that he creates using the night time city landscape and the snow is just spectacular. It is hard to describe in the words. It has to be seen to be believed. James Mason has surely the most beautiful and beauitfully expressive faces (or at least masculine faces) ever captured on screen. There is not much for him to do dramatically, except to show the effort he has to make to drag himself but he still conveys an extraodinary sensitivity, pain and despair just by his face. James Mason dragging himself in the snow must surely be one of the great moments in cinema and so must be the heartbreaking ending. This is a classic for ages.

This contains links to reviews and quotes about the film. Roman Polanski says, "Superior, I think, to The Third Man. What really grabbed me at sixteen was the heavy atmosphere that hangs over everybody in the town. I still consider it one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and a film which made me want to pursue this career more than anything else. It’s still fabulous, probably James Mason’s best picture. No film made me happier than Odd Man Out.”

2666: David Lynch Connection

2009-11-17T13:09:00.000-05:00

One reviewer of 2666 has already called it "a love child of David Lynch and Borges."

There is one reference to Lynch which I thought was quite meaningful and revealing. When I read it first I was quite taken aback. Is there really a place like that, I thought. But then I realized it was not any gratuitous reference because Fire Walk with Me is also about the brutal end of a young girl. Moreover I feel Bolano is trying to say something similar about the nature of evil as David Lynch does in Twin Peaks. Bolano's Santa Teresa is somewhat like the "woods" that surround Twin Peaks. Woods as the mysterious source of evil. Evil which is not inside any person but something much more mystical, immanent, something which is, to say, part of the surroundings itself. In Twin Peaks the killer is caught but the mysterious "Bob" remains free and says he will kill again. May be Bolano's Santa Teresa has its own Bob.

Anyway this is the excerpt from the third section of the novel, "The Part About Fate":

The card for the Santa Teresa cybercafe was a deep red, so red that it was hard to read what was printed on it. On the back, in a lighter red, was a map that showed exactly where the cafe was located. He asked the receptionist to translate the name of the place. The clerk laughed and said it was called Fire, Walk With Me.
"It sounds like the title of a David Lynch film," said Fate.
The clerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse and wide-ranging homages.
"Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even the things that haven't happened yet," he said.
After he told Fate how to get to the cybercafe, they talked for a while about Lynch's films. The clerk had seen all of them. Fate had only seen three or four. According to the clerk, Lynch's greatest achievement was the TV series Twin Peaks.Fate liked the The Elephant Man best, may be because he'd often felt like the elephant man himself, wanting to be like other people but at the same time knowing he was different. When the clerk asked him whether he'd heard that Michael Jackson had bought or tried to buy the skeleton of the elephant man, Fate shrugged and said that Michael Jackson was sick. I don't think so, said the clerk, watching something presumably important that was happening on TV just then.
"In my opinion," he said with his eyes fixed on the TV fate couldn't see, "Michael knows things the rest of us don't."

"this whole motherfucker of a planet."

2009-11-17T10:37:00.000-05:00

[But] what are good times? Sergio Gonzalez asked himself. Maybe they're what separate certain people from the rest of us, who live in a state of perpetual sadness. The will to live, the will to fight, as his father used to say, but fight what? The inevitable? Fight who? And what for? More time, certain knowledge, the glimpse of something essential? As if there were something essential on this whole self-sucking motherfucker of a planet.

This is from page 563 of 2666. More than two hundred pages of rape, murder, torture, mutilation and still about hundred more pages to go. Like a macabre and horrifying musical composition. Reading it feels like it is never going to end. Of course, that is the intended effect: A never-ending cycle of life on this "motherfucking planet."

I had never heard of Ciudad Juarez before reading the reviews of the book. This is a nice article about the killings first published in 2003. According to wikipedia, it hasn't stopped. It still goes on. Reading Bolano it feels like it never will. More when I am done with the book. Hopefully soon though it looks difficult.

2009-11-17T10:19:00.001-05:00

It's been a really long period of silence here in Zembla. Sorry about disappearing for so long. Been busy, but nothing special. Just regular banalities of life: new job (and where blog sites are banned as well), accumulating possessions to complete a bourgeois existence, and on top of that some upheavals in personal life.

It has not been just blogging, I have been mostly away from internet: social networks, email and chat as well (I was never active on twitter!). Part of it was also a conscious attempt to get away from it all just to make sure that I wasn't getting too dependent on all this and when I really did. I didn't feel like coming back. That is, until now. I hope I will continue from now on as I used to.

Armond White Profile

2009-03-22T13:06:00.002-05:00

from the new york magazine, an excellent profile of the nutty film critic Armond White.

Heidegger on Mood

2009-03-22T11:56:00.002-05:00

There is a very interesting discussion of moods in Being and Time. Interesting specially because it is quite different from what we generally think of when we think about moods. In so far as I understood what I read, Heidegger says that mood is not just a cognitive or psychological concept but something much more fundamental ("ontological"). He further says that there is nothing like not being in any mood. If we are in the world we are "always already in the mood."

"Both the undisturbed equanimity and the inhibited discontent of everyday heedfulness, the way we slide over from one to another or slip into bad moods, are by no means nothing ontologically although these phenomena remain unnoticed as what is supposedly the most indifferent and fleeting in Da-sein."

He also uses another word "attunement" for mood which probably makes it easier to understand what he really means. It is through moods that Dasein (that is us) attunes itself with the world. So the lack of mood which we experience in our banal everyday life is exactly what is required to deal with the banalities of life. The mood of angst and intense boredom on the other hand reveal to us our own existence in the world. The banal everyday mood is actually a flight away from the intensity one feels when one is in these moods. Then there is something like "public mood" too, which is again a flight away from authenticity.

We generally try to separate mood from thought, assuming that being in a mood will cloud the way we see and think of the world but as Heidegger says, it is only through moods that we are affected by the world. Unless we are in a mood we will not be affected by anything, nothing will matter. So if you are thinking about the world you have to think through a mood. So I guess scientists have their moods, mathematicians have theirs and philosophers (at least the existential ones) and poets of course have angst.

Keeping with the tone of the rest of the book Heidegger doesn't offer any prescriptions (of how we can be in more control of mood swings) but I guess heightened self-awareness (and the same of people around oneself) of moods will be of some help in this.

The Desperate Reader

2009-03-14T15:47:00.003-05:00

Another excerpt from The Savage Detectives. I think I am a cool-headed reader but I definitely prefer literature of desperation, books "full of sharp instruments" much more than books which are "carefully thought-out" or "technically perfect"....

Joaquim Font, El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Deserto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF, January 1977

There are books for when you're bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you're calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you are sad. And then there're books for when you are happy. There are books for when you're thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you're desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we'll soon see. Let's take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you're calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That's how I see it. I hope I'm not offending anyone. Now let's take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He's the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he's a limited reader. Why limited? That's easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who's unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain ( a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Miserables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or late they're exhausted! Why? It's obvious! One can't live one's whole life in desperation. In the end body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he's cured! And then as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly - as if wrapped in swaddling clothes, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives - he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what's called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don't mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they're good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn't pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don't exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles! And yet I was mad, driven mad by them, by my daughters, by Laura Damian, and so they didn't listen.

"steady drip of intellectual menses"

2009-03-14T13:53:00.000-05:00

A truly eye-popping phrase which cracked me up!

A short extract from "The Savage Detectives", this is one of the narrators talking about a poet's manifesto for "Mexican Actualist Avant-garde"(!) More when I am done with the book...

"I exert all the young poets, painters, and sculptors of Mexico, those who have yet to be tainted by the coffered gold of government sinecures, those who have yet to be corrupted by the crooked praise of official criticism and the applause of a crass and concupiscent public , those who have yet to lick the plates of the culinary celebrations of Enrique Gonzalez martinez , I exert all of them to make art with the steady drip of their intellectual menses. All those of good faith, all those who haven't crumbled in the sad, mephitic efflorescence of our nationalist media with its stink of pulquerias and the dying embers of fried food, all are exerted in the name of Mexican actualist avant-garde to come and fight alongside us in the resplendent ranks of the decouvert..."

the narrator says that "exert" might be a printer's error and wonders if he really meant exhort!

Shopping

2009-02-14T10:22:00.004-05:00

An extract from Don DeLillo's White Noise. I found it pretty boring but at least it is not as huge as Underworld which I had to abandon. DeLillo, like Pynchon, is just not my cup of tea it seems. Reading the book I felt I should have rather read an essay by a sociologist and one of those continental thinkers who write gloomy treatises on media, consumerism, technology, capitalism, the dehumanizing effect of American culture and the general hopelessness of our postmodern world... DeLillo is quite funny and sharp at places but not as much as his reputation would lead one to believe. The idea of the essential absurdity of much of mainstream life in America (and indeed rest of the world too) exemplified by shopping, among other things, is not very original but still it is quite funny to read.

********

The encounter put me in the mood to shop. I found the others and we walked across two parking lots to the main structure in the Mid-Village Mall, a ten-story building arranged around a center court of waterfalls, promenades and gardens. Babette and the kids followed me into the elevator, into the shops set along the tiers, through the emporiums and department stores, puzzled but excited by my desire to buy. When I could not decide between two shirts, they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry, they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki. The two girls scouted ahead, spotting things they thought I might want or need, running back to get me, to clutch my arms, plead me to follow. They were my guides to endless well-being. People swarmed through the boutiques and gourmet shops. Organ music rose from the great court. We smelled chocolate, popcorn, cologne; we smelled rugs and furs, hanging salamis and deathly vinyl. My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at last. They gave me advice, badgered clerks on my behalf. I kept seeing myself unexpectedly in some reflecting surface. We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire deparments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another. There was always another store, three floors, eight floors, basement full of cheese graters and paring knives. I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate need and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise, I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books to search for elsuive designs. I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. We crossed from furniture to men's wear, walking through cosmetics. Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in security rooms. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit. I felt expansive, inclined to be sweepingly genrous, and told the kids to pick out their Christmas gifts here and now. I gestured in what I felt was an expansive manner. I could tell they were impressed. They fannned out across the area, each of them suddenly inclined to be private, shadowy, even secretive. Periodically one of them would return to register the name of an item with Babette, careful not to let the others know what it was. I myself was not to be bothered with tedious details. I was the benefactor, the one who dispenses gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh. The children knew it was the nature of such things that I could not be expected to engage in technical discussions about the gifts themselves. We ate another meal. A band played live Muzak. Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled through the vast gallery, mising with noises from the tiers, with shuffling feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people earing, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction.

why Kierkegaard would have hated internet

2009-02-14T07:12:00.001-05:00

Long absence from the blogworld again! I used to always complain (to myself) that "nothing happens in life", like Charlie Kaufmann says in Adaptation. Well, for a change, too many things are happening in life these days. Have been busy at work and many other things and for some reason I don't feel like spending too much time on the internet.

Here is a provocative article by Hubert Dreyfus disucssing why Kierkegaard would have hated internet, blogging and facebook. He writes about some of the things I have been thinking about these days. He says that internet promotes a mode of life which is free of commitments, risks and responsibilities and so is essentially meaningless and nihilistic. The same is actually applicable to the the entire public or social sphere that we live in too. We act, speak and in general conduct ourselves as if nothing is at stake, definitely nothing personal is at stake. The internet is full of information but it is always without context and "desituated". All of this makes a lot of sense to me but ultimately I also think it should be up to the individual to decide how to use internet.

Anyway, today also happens to be the valentine's day. So best wishes and just in case you happen to be in India, take care, be safe and don't get thrashed by the culture goons.

Humour from Pakistan

2009-01-12T02:54:00.001-05:00

For a change something funny coming out of Pakistan.

"Those who suffer, suffer alone"

2009-01-08T00:49:00.002-05:00

An excerpt from The Book of Disquiet. A cautionary tale (or an ironic comment) about too much inwardness?

*********

Whether I like it or not, everything that isn't my soul is no more for me than scenery and decoration. Through rational thought I can recognize that a man is a living being just like me, but for my true, involuntary self he has always had less importance than a tree, if the tree is more beautiful. That's why I've always seen human events - the great collective tragedies of history or of what we make of history - as colourful friezes, with no soul in the figures that appear there. I've never thought twice about anything tragic that has happened in China. It's just scenery in the distance, even if painted with blood and disease.

With ironic sadness I remember a workers' demonstration, carried out with I don't know how much sincerity (for I find it hard to admit sincerity in collective endeavours, given that the individual, all by himself, is the only entity capable of feeling). It was teeming and rowdy group of animated idiots, who passed by my outsider's indifference shouting various things. I instantly felt disgusted. They weren't even sufficiently dirty. Those who truly suffer don't form a group or go around a mob. Those who suffer, suffer alone.

What a pathetic group! What a lack of humanity and true pain! They were real and therefore unbelievable. No one could ever use them for the scene of a novel or a descriptive backdrop. They went by like rubbish in a river, in the river of life, and to see them go by made me sick to my stomach and profoundly sleepy.

Catching up with Bollywood

2009-01-06T06:56:00.002-05:00

Ghajini

I went to see a hindi movie in theatre after a really long time. The last time was "Mangal Pandey" a couple of years back and it was a really traumatic experience. I saw Rang De Basanti and Taare Zameen Par both last year on DVD and regretted having missed them on big screen. I had some serious problems with the "political" content or the "message" of Rang De Basanti and how it went about delivering it but it was still heartwarming to see a mainstream Bollywood movie trying a little harder. I loved TZP too and was really glad that it became such a big commercial success and a general topic of discussion. I don't know how much was it able to change people's perspectives but if it made them think critically about how our schools and colleges behave as if they were factories and how dehumanizing competition can be for children, it still served its purpose.

Now coming to Ghajini, I actually rather liked it. One of my friends had warned me about it saying that Aamir Khan has moved into the Sunny Deol's "Haath nahi hathoda" territory so may be it was because I went with lower expectations and consciously tried not to think about those two earlier films. The romantic track was wonderful, very natural and spontaneous. It was nice to see a new actress getting so much screen space and opportunity to shine and she did a really good job. I liked the way the love story was cut short by tragedy just after the wonderful song "Kaise Mujhe...", it could have been even better if their mutual acceptance had remained in their hearts before the tragedy struck. But that's probably only me with my masochistic leanings.

It is still hard not to express disappointment over a nice opportunity wasted. The story about memory loss could have gained some depth if they had concentrated on how the awareness of passage of time is essential to grieving and moving on and how without it the wounds never heal, even the emotional closure that craving for justice and revenge provide may prove illusive. Then there is the idea of identity, how to form relationship with other people based on trust and how all this is linked to memory, and who knows even an allegory about the dangerous effects of "live for the moment" philosophy. I mean, I wasn't looking for a course in existential philosophy but these things do cross our minds when we sit alone and think. Memento also didn't veer into these territories so for me it was ultimately a shallow film, a clever puzzle yes but ultimately uninteresting and shallow.

I was trying not to think of Rang de Basanti all the while but that scene after the protest in which he breaks down is hard to forget. Specially when, as in this film, he just screams and growls and moves his hands randomly all around. I really hope he doesn't let all the success of Ghajini get into his head and treat it as just temporary distraction.

A Wedenesday

This took me completely by surprise. Extremely impressive and very cathartic after a terror-filled 2008. An excellently made thriller with a stirring and provocative "message" in the end, all the more disturbing because it comes straight from the heart. I can't think of a better film which captures the psyche of ordinary people after so many senseless terrorist attacks that India saw in 2008. It gets even more impressive when you realize that it is the work of a debutante director (Neeraj Pandey). I am really looking forward to whatever he does next.

Fashion

This was just a random choice, not something I expected to like and it was exactly what I expected it to be - shallow and dumb moralizing about the evils of modernity. I didn't think it was unfair. I am no fan of fashion industry. It is dehumanizing, exploitative and alienating (just like many other jobs such as, ummm, software programming?) but there is a difference between moralizing, using your received ideas and cliched opinions and criticising something on ethical grounds which requires thinking through your ethical principles and applying them to reality.

Singh is King

Inanity. Beyond any commentary.

Next up on my bollywood catch up (planning to see): Chak De India, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye, Jodhaa Akbar (?), No Smoking, Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na (?)

Question marks are because I feel ambivalent about these films. First because of Aishwarya and second because of teenagers.

Self Help

2009-01-05T00:50:00.002-05:00

Nice article on the growing menace of self-help books. I liked this comment about the "law of attraction", a very common motif in these books:

"This law posits, quite simply, that thoughts become things. If you ask the universe for what you want, focus on having it, behave as though it's already there and are open to having it then the universe will deliver, whether the object of your desires is a new dishwasher, clear skin, a baby or a million dollars. Guaranteed. Thousands of books now exist based on this simple principle, many of which have spent months on the New York Times bestseller list.

Offering structure and guidance in an increasingly secular society, these bibles can easily be regarded as merely repackaging the same inspiration historically provided by our languishing religions; to consider the Law of Attraction as merely a new, benign, more digestible name for prayer. But there is a crucial difference between the two - while prayer by its very definition acknowledges that ultimate control lies outside of the self (and atheists can equally substitute fate, destiny, gravity or particle physics for a deity in that construction), positive thinking and the Law of Attraction invest ultimate control in the individual, suggesting that by using thought, said individual can effect seismic shifts in their outer world, with nothing whatsoever attributed to social structures, cultural roles, interaction, genetics or dumb luck. The Law of Attraction posits that thoughts create reality, investing in the individual both extraordinary power and extraordinary responsibility. Egocentricity is central. Craving becomes having. Wanting becomes deserving. "

Female Gaze

2009-01-05T00:35:00.002-05:00

Well, not really because the camera is still standing in for the male gaze but this is still a very interesting shot!

Still is from the 1970 french film Les Stances à Sophie. Photo copied from Glenn Kenny's blog.

I am curious about what the feminist film theorists have to say about the recent trend in bollywood movies of male actors shedding their clothes and the camera objectifying their bodies. (The contours of Aamir Khan's naked torso are on national news.) So is it the film makers acknowledging the existence of a female spectator finally?

Bigger Than Life

2009-01-02T00:02:00.002-05:00

This is another film on my to-see list - Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life (or "Delirium of Madness" as the Spanish poster has it). Martin Scorsese heaps a lot of praise on this film in his documentary on the history of American cinema. Film Forum is screening it this week and they have put up a nice page full of quotes and links about the film, including one to the original new yorker article which inspired the story. Hope it gets available on the dvd soon.

Classic Film Posters

2008-12-30T23:12:00.002-05:00

This site has a great collection of posters of classic films. Here is a selection of classic film noirs.

Poster above via Dave Kehr's blog. I am glad to see Richard Brooks' "In Cold Blood" being selected for preservation. I saw it once on big screen and it was an unforgettable experience. Gripping and actually quite frightening. Surprisingly it is not very well known, even after the success of the recent films about Truman Capote.

2008 in Reading

2008-12-29T03:08:00.003-05:00

I didn't read a lot of fiction this year. Nothing like last couple of years when I discovered Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Alberto Moravia, Italo Svevo and others for the first time. (Last year's list here.) I spent more time reading non-fiction and even there, mostly essays and fragments, the most provocative and disturbing of which was "Modernity and the Holocaust" by Polish-British sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. After this I tried reading his other works on consumerism and modern societies and found similar provocative insights. Basically he explains how the scientific-technocratic-instrumentalist worldview which defines our modern world poses grave problems to an ethical life though he ultimately, like most philosophers, is better at diagnosis than at treatment. One of his essays is titled "Does Ethics have a chance in a world of consumers?" He is quite pessimistic about it. I have probably become oversensitive to the whole issue now. I just bristle when I see the language of science, technology or economics being applied in the domain of personal human affairs. I am looking forward to exploring more in this direction, specially the work of Jurgen Habermas.

I also spent a lot of time this year struggling with Heidegger's philosophy though without much success. Still from whatever I read and understood, he had me convinced that the story of (so-called) human civilization was actually a story of decline and disaster and that we all have probably come to this earth a few thousand years too late. I didn't understand his ideas about the various modes of being, authenticity etc totally but they kept moving around in my head for most of the year. His essays on the origins of the work of art and on technology were also provocative and in fact startling (and it is true for his other writings as well) in the sense that it showed me the nature of the process of thinking itself rather than just the result of some thought. George Steiner's short monograph on Heidegger was specially brilliant.

The three best books of fiction I read this year were all from Latin America. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis was without any doubt the most entertaining book I read the whole year. Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo was a strange, evocative and densely layered ghost story which stayed with me for a long time. Senselessness by Carlos Moya was no less strange. It kept me thinking about what to really make of it.

The most disappointing book of the year for me was Journey to the End of the Night by Celine. I had wanted to read it for such a long time but found it tame and boring. A slog through and through, absolutely contrary to its reputation. I was also extremely annoyed by Cultural Amnesia, the essay collection by Clive James. Sartre was an idiot. Neruda was a fascist. Brecht was a moron. And on and on. It had me actually depressed realizing that just reading a lot and having an opinion on everything doesn't make you wise, interesting or open to different ways of looking at the world and yourself. A great lesson to learn, specially for bloggers.

Revolutionary Road

2008-12-24T05:10:00.002-05:00

I have been reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates these days. Initially I thought it was quite conventional and straightforward in style and the theme of ennui and quiet despair of suburban life pretty hackneyed but it really sucked me in, to the extent that I found it really unsettling, even terrifying. Most reviews of the movie talk about pressure of conformism in the America of the 50s but it is much more than that. It made me think of what the underground man says in Dostoevsky's novella, that for ordinary life in modern cities the consciousness of an insect would be more than enough, that one doesn't need the consciousness of a human being (he further says that he wants to be an insect). The tragedy of the Wheeler couple is that they have a human consciousness with all its romantic aspirations and intimations of potentialities but they lack the spiritual and moral strength to take action. I am quite eager to see how the movie turns out to be. I wish Fassbinder would have made a movie out of it, though many of his films did tackle the same subject.

There was an essay by James Wood in the new yorker about Yates and Revolutionary Road.

2008-12-01T05:45:00.002-05:00

It's been longer than expected but I don't really feel like blogging anymore. Just waking up in the morning and getting on with normal life feels like an act of resistance these days and on top of that I have to sort out so many things. Hopefully it gets over soon...

Away...

2008-11-02T20:59:00.002-05:00

Will be back in a few weeks. Or sooner.

To keep you company here are David Lynch (words), Angelo Badalamenti (music) and Julee Cruise (voice)

A brief note on Synecdoche New York which I saw today. The basic theme seems to be the melancholia of "being-toward-death" but otherwise it is too fragmented and too full of small and seemingly chaotic details. It definitely needs more than one viewing, extra careful and attentive ones at that. There are some funny moments, in that awkward and absurd way which made his earlier films distinctive, but which don't really work here. There is no mistaking the sincerity and seriousness of intent though. He shouldn't have too many hopes for Oscars though. It will definitely go over their heads.

Lev Shestov

2008-10-30T09:05:00.004-05:00

I came across this website which collects the writings of Lev Shestov, a Russian religious-existentialist philosopher who also wrote books on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The basic motif of his thinking seems to be that accepting 2 plus 2 equals 4 is accepting a spiritual death. Well, almost! The website also contains lots of articles and essays written about him. This review by Emmanuel Levinas is a good short introduction and contains this nice summary of existentialist philosophy.

"In a world clarified and explained by reason, only the general counts: my destiny is nothing important, my pain is nothing exceptional, my despair is nothing unique; if I carry a sadness or a shame in the depth of my soul, that does not trouble the universal order. My speculation assigns to these things a place in the whole, and my only wisdom can only consist of my submitting to its laws. But before speculating, I exist. My existence goes on precisely in this pain, in this despair. Far from arranging themselves in a whole that would embrace them, that are all mine. They have their history, their truth, their weight, their own exigencies. I can drive them back, but I can never fully suppress them. Their voice tears my being in spite of my submission to universal necessity. My speculation, itself, is it wholly independent of them? Can it be legitimately abstracted from the human condition, for its destiny, for its death? Whatever the response that one gives to these questions, it is important to pose them, it is important to respect the internal meaning of the events that constitute our existence, before interpreting them through the universal order constructed by reason. This is the task of existential philosophy."

There is also a very good article by Czeslaw Milosz:

"The "I" has to recognize that it is confronted with a world that follows its own laws, a world whose name is Necessity. This, according to Shestov, is precisely what lies at the foundations of traditional philosophy—first Greek, then every philosophy faithful to the Greeks. Only the necessary, the general, and the always valid will merit investigation and reflection. The contingent, the particular, and the momentary are spoilers of unity—a teaching that dates back to Anaximander. Later Greek thinkers exalted the all-embracing Oneness and represented individual existence as a crack in the perfectly smooth surface of the One, a flaw for which the individual had to pay with his death. From a Shestovian perspective, Greek science and morality both follow the same path. The sum of the angles in a triangle equals two right angles; the general, eternal truth reigns high above breeding and dying mortals just as eternal good does not change whether or not there is a living man to aspire to it."

Synecdoche Reviews

2008-10-28T21:55:00.002-05:00

I really hope I get a chance to see "Synecdoche New York" before I leave but it seems unlikely. Most American reviewers are complaining about how glum and joyless it is (further adding to my excitement!). I don't know, it is like asking Woody Allen to keep doing the same "early funny ones" (as one of the characters says in his "Stardust Memories"). Kaufman's earlier films as screenwriter were funny and quirky but one couldn't but notice a deep seriousness of intent and engagement with Life, something very rare in mainstream Hollywood. Reading the reviews, even the critical ones, it seems he has only gone one step further. Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich were already five out of five stars masterpieces.

The best magnifying glass

2008-10-28T21:26:00.002-05:00

"A shard in your own eye is the best magnifying glass."

-Adorno, Minima Moralia (full text here)

Nice thought even though in real life pain often becomes a smokescreen, hiding from us the truth rather than magnifying it.

In other news, I am dismayed by this new advertisement promoting atheism. I do think it is very important to counter all sorts of religious propaganda so this is definitely a good idea. What I don't like is the second line which smacks of smug and petty-bourgeois hedonism to me which I strongly disapprove of. It should rather have been "There is probably no God. Now read Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and most of all START WORRYING!"

Literature in the Marketplace

2008-10-26T20:06:00.002-05:00

The TLS has a review of a book by some right-wing nut who says that literary critics are unjustifiably hostile to market and commercialism and argues for something called "commodity aesthetics" (do words really mean nothing anymore?). The review itself is quite good and really worth reading.

"It is paradoxical for an advocate of the Western cultural tradition to laud market capitalism. For in the very brief period in which it has held earthly power, market capitalism has essentially destroyed that tradition – profaning everything sacred, evaporating everything solid, and directing its destructive might with particular intensity against the autonomous individual. It has instituted the rule of appearance over essence, of signs over things, of things over people, of dead labour over living labour. It exploits base appetites and fosters insatiable desires, giving rise to epidemic addiction and depression. There have been many societies in which large numbers of people dedicated their lives to the pursuit of economic self-interest through the market. But there have been no societies in which the pursuit of economic self-interest through the market was held to be an admirable way to spend one’s life. Our society is unique in having produced that philosophy. One of the reasons to read the literature of the past is to learn how anomalous our society is in its self-interested single-mindedness. "

A Death of One's Own

2008-10-24T11:45:00.003-05:00

"[T]he desire to have one's own death is becoming more and more rare. Shortly it will be as rare as a life of one's own."

- Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I saw Paul Schrader's Mishima a few days back. I haven't read anything by Mishima yet but watching the film reminded me of this line from Rilke. I don't really like this morbid romanticization and fascination of death. A lot of suicide bombers are probably inspired by the same belief too - having a death of one's own. Ironically (and tragically) their religion makes it sure that they never live a life of their own.

I like the idea of Memento Mori. We should be mindful of our own end without which we won't have any perspective to life. But this idea that death is the realization of life and life gets meaning only in death - this I find hard to accept.

A good illustration of this idea is in Heidegger. Below excerpt is from George Steiner's book on Heidegger ("rationalist quacks" made me chuckle!):

"The inalienability of death - the plain but overwhelming fact that each must die for himself, that death is one existential potentiality which no enslavement, no promise, no power of "theyness" can take away from individual man - is the fundamental truth of the meaning of being. Dasein is always a not-yet, an unripeness. To be is to be incomplete, unfulfilled. But at the same time, all authentic being is a being-toward-its-own-end. "Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes upon itself as soon as it is." And Heidegger quotes a medieval homily which instructs us that "as soon as man enters on life, he is at once old enough to die." The essence, the motion, the meaning of life are totally at one with being-toward-death, with the individual's "assumption" (Sartre's derivative, key term) of his own singular death. Thus "death is, in the widest sense, a phenomenon of life"; indeed, it may well be the identifying phenomenon, though it cannot itself "be lived" (a point on which Heidegger concurs explicitly with Wittgensein). The point to be stressed is at once existential and logical: the possibility of Dasein depends on and makes sense only in respect of the "impossibility of Dasein" which is death. The one cannot be without the other.

[...]

Holding before itself the constant and total possibility of death, the possibility inseparable from its thrownness into the world and process of individualization, Dasein "is in anxiety." Angst is the taking upon oneself of the nearness of nothingness, of the potential non-being of one's own being. "Being-toward-death is, in essense, anxiety," and those who would rob us of this anxiety - be they priests, physicians, mystics, or rationalist quacks - by transforming it into either fear or genteel indifference alienate us from life itself. Or, more exactly, they insulate us from a fundamental source of freedom. The passage, to which the entire death-and=freedom dialectic of Camus and Sartre is no more than a rhetorical footnote, is a famous one: Angst reveals to Dasein the possiblity of fulfilling itself "in an impassioned FREEDOM TOWARD DEATH - a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the "they," and which is factual, certain of itself and anxious." We can see now that the very meaning of Dasein is "in time." Temporality is made concrete by the overwhelming truth that all being is being-toward-death. The taking upon oneself, through Angst, of this existential "terminality" is the absolute condition of human freedom."

Weltflucht

2008-10-22T18:53:00.003-05:00

Weltflucht: nice word to know. Quite simple actually - it means flight from the world - but it is still nice to have it as one word. Somewhat similar in intent with the hindi word "Vanaprastha" which means departing to the forests before final sanyas (renunciation). My favourite word still remains Weltschmerz ("world pain" or pain of being in the world). Basically Weltschmerz leads to Weltflucht.

Actually I found it in this article which I got to by randomly searching something. Looks like some German philosopher has written a book called "Critique of Cynical Reason." Certainly a very interesting and relevant subject since cynicism is the default mode in which most of us operate in the world now.

Authenticity in Indian Writing

2008-10-21T13:29:00.002-05:00

Amitava Kumar has an essay in Boston Review about debates surrounding the problems of thinking about authenticity in Indian Writing in English in the context of the recent booker win of Arvind Adiga's novel The White Tiger:

"Since then, I have wondered whether my choice of the journalist as a protagonist is not itself a symptom of an anxiety about authenticity. Was it the worry of an expatriate Indian, concerned about losing touch with the society he took as his subject? To invest in an aesthetic of observation and reportage was to build banks against the rising tide of that worry. I know now that this worry informs my reading of all novels about India."

*****

Some more tangentially related thoughts...

I haven't read Adiga's novel and don't feel excited enough to read it either. In general Indian novels (specially those in English) are low on my reading priorities and further because I have only a finite amount of energy and time which I can devote to books I rarely get to them. One reason for putting those on low priority is my fear and distaste of any kind of parochiality or even "insularity" (to use a much discussed and debated concept recently, after the nobel committee chairman's comment). In my case this feeling is further compounded because I grew up in a provincial small town (that would be Patna in Bihar which both Adiga and Kumar talk about) and not in the "centres" like Delhi or Mumbai. This is not really a repudiation of my origins (which would be purely negative) but rather a positive longing to know about other ways of looking at things, the desire to enter the world of thoughts and ideas which are new and foreign. I had quoted Susan Sontag earlier saying that writing for her was a means of self-transcendence and not self-expression. I think of reading in the same terms too. I feel dismayed when people while reading look for experiences which exactly mirrors their own (expressed in commonly heard sentiment "I could relate to this or that"), this to me is a severely disabling way of reading. Reading itself should open pathways to new and uncharted territories of experiences, only then one can "grow" or change oneself by reading.

About authenticity in Indian writing in English, I think Kumar mentions exactly what I find so boring and uninteresting in most such writings (including probably his own novel "Home Products" which I haven't read either). This is the definition of authenticity which he thinks is some kind of fidelity to the external world of facts and people's behavior. This is a shallow authenticity, it belongs not in art but in journalism. In fact it is not even authenticity at all, it is just another version of Heideggerian "idle talk" which journalists and op-ed experts are so good at peddling. (This is not to say that shallow reportage doesn't serve any purpose but we shouldn't confuse it with art). The authenticity that interests me is being authentic to your Self, to your way of thinking and feeling, to your way of looking at the world and your own self, in short to your own way of being itself. Truly remarkable novelists and artists take it one step further, they try to understand being from a historical and intellectual perspective and try to place it in a number of different contexts and think through these. This to my mind what makes something like "The Man Without Qualities" a sort of uber-modern novel. (If I am not mistaken Musil doesn't even mention a single street name or any such thing throughout the novel and yet it profoundly belongs to its place and time. This to me is real authenticity.)

Coming to another point which Kumar talked about in excerpt above - the so-called anxiety of expatriate Indian, this fear of losing touch with India, which means the fear of losing a part of your self, which gives rise to anxiety which then leads to fetishisation of naive realism. This is all okay but somehow I am not convinced that Indian-ness can be reduced to those naively captured details no matter how strong your "observational integrity" (as Kumar calls it) is. The very fact that the writer feels insecure about being perceived as inauthentic gives the game away. One could of course be self-aware about it and write about the same anxiety in fiction but I don't think these novels do that. There is a lack of self-awarenss and a lack of doubt which goes hand in hand with a devotion to a naive journalistic realism. Another irony is that these writers have left India because they were lured by academic and material success abroad but still feel guilty and are not ready to reconcile it with their new life. Just compare the musings of these so-called expatriate writers with someone like Nabokov who was in the same position in America and you will see the difference. I understand Nabokov is surely setting the bar ridiculously high but one can still see how a longing for lost home and lost past gives rise to this fetishisation of detail in Nabokov but since the longing and the pain are authentic, so is the writing. These sundry assistant professors and journalistic correspondents on the other hand should stick to writing reportage, rather than lamenting about losing touch with real India.

Free Market and Ethics?

2008-10-19T20:27:00.002-05:00

A bunch of thinkers and experts give their opinions on whether "free market corrodes moral character."

Surprisingly none of them (of the ones I read) touch on what I would think is the main issue - the problem of alienation. Are human beings who participate in market really and truly autonomous moral agents? More often they merely follow the preset rules, exercising moral judgments often leads to inefficiencies which market can't tolerate. Of course the recent crisis has made the profoundly undemocratic (even anti-democratic) nature of financial markets pretty clear too but that is probably a separate issue.

Herbert Marcuse

2008-10-19T19:44:00.002-05:00

This is an excellent video introduction to the ideas of philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse.

His book One-dimensional Man is also available here. I remember buying a copy a few years back with a nice cover featuring a lone and sad looking computer monitor, thinking it was some philosophy book about the alienation of computer programmers, which in a way it is, but never really read the book. Like most philosophers readability isn't really his strong point. The book is mainly a critique of "technological rationality", the dominant mode of thinking in advanced industrial societies, which he says has turned these societies into authoritarian and conformist. Rationality originally meant differentiating what is from what appears to be and in this way to get to the truth of being and reality but in the technological age rationality is about efficiency and how to get things to work, or in economics sense, how to maximize one's utility function. Further this thinking is standardized and existence of any other alternative is denied through propaganda. (Like, if you don't buy and spend money economy will crash etc.) Advertising, media and other organizations decide and manipulate discourse in such a way as to not leave any room for negation. The end result is that we are trapped in a prison and only have imaginary, trivial or inconsequential freedoms.

2+2=4?

2008-10-15T22:16:00.005-05:00

This is the Underground Man ranting against the tyranny of mathematics and the laws of nature. This is something which troubles me and fascinates me more and more - this paradoxical nature of human freedom. We know that we are free and we feel compelled by the need for self-assertion to prove it and at the same time knowing fully well how utterly futile it is. What Underground Man says is of course an exaggeration (if still a logical extension of the argument) but we still should try to protect our inner and subjective life (which means our identities) from the intrusions of logic and science. As Musil humorously says in The Man Without Qualities, "What is a soul? It is easy to define it negatively: it is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series." (Actually Musil's comment is intended ironically to poke fun at "spiritually" minded and pretentious people who are hostile to mathemtics in a shallow way but more on that later.)

*******

"The impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.

“Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall ... and so on, and so on.”

Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength."

Karl Kraus Blogger?

2008-10-15T08:24:00.003-05:00

The latest new york review of books has an essay by Adam Kirsch on Austrian critic and satirist Karl Kraus. It is behind the subscriber wall but this bit is interesting... (in short, beware of journalists and op-ed experts)

"But if Kraus were simply a press critic in this sense—pointing out errors and clichés, or even exposing biases and conflicts of interest—he would not remain such a significant figure, seventy-two years after his death. He would be merely a kind of blogger avant la lettre, appending his "glosses" to newspaper items in the way that bloggers today post hyperlinks along with carping comments. The analogy even extends to Kraus's working methods: as Timms writes, he would compose an item for Die Fackel by "pasting a newspaper clipping on a larger sheet of paper, to define an opponent's position. That position would then be encircled—penned in by Kraus's minute handwriting."

But Kraus was a critic of the press in a deeper and more problematic sense as well. During World War I, his longtime feud with the Viennese newspapers took on an apocalyptic character, as Kraus began to blame them for causing the disaster on which they so complacently reported. In November 1914, as the Western Front settled into stalemate, Kraus gave a public reading of his essay "In This Great Time," which appeared in Die Fackel the next month. Though it was his first public statement since the war began, Kraus did not address the war's political and diplomatic causes. The real origin of the world war, he argued, lay not in Austrian expansionism or German belligerence, but in a continent-wide failure of imagination, which allowed the nations of Europe to rush into a catastrophe whose dimensions they could not perceive. "Things are happening," Kraus said in his long, dazzlingly constructed opening sentence, "that could not be imagined and...what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen."

The agency responsible for this atrophy of the imagination, Kraus continued, was his old adversary, the press. "Through decades of practice, [the reporter] has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself." This logic is what allowed Kraus to argue, in a paradox worthy of Wilde, that the reporting on the war was more important than the war itself: "Is the press a messenger? No, it is the event itself. A speech? No, life itself." He even predicted that "some day people might find out what a trifling matter such a world war was as compared to the intellectual self- annihilation of mankind by means of its press and how at bottom it constituted only one of the press's emanations." "

:) OR :(

2008-10-14T06:36:00.000-05:00

I was reading about "commodification" and I was thinking how smiling face has become a commodity in our culture, which would probably explain the baffling indifference I feel when I see a smiling face. I exaggerate a little here, but you get the idea. Of course one can't deny the existence of a real smiling face but how is one to make sure it is authentic and not one of the smiling faces of advertisements, media, hospitality & PR people which surround us and assault our senses from every side?

In The Man Without Qualities, Musil says that (I paraphrase) in our modern world experiences have made themselves independent of people. They have gone on stages, in books, into reports of research institutes and explorers..and even when they are not objectified in this way, they are always up in the air; who can say today that the anger one feels is really his or her anger? Musil calls this "a world of qualities without a man". So the smile doesn't belong to the person who is doing the smiling. It is just a borrowed smile, plucked from the air.

The first step is the thingification of thoughts and feelings which the capitalist culture then transforms into mass produced commodities and cliches. From human experience to hallmark cards, that is the trajectory of so-called "late capitalism"! I suspect Pain would be hard to commoditise and sell, so there is probably one refuge if one wants to own one's experience. As the female character in the Japanese film "Audition" says, "Words create lies, only pain can be trusted." Though I think if you see too many art-house movies these days you will realize that even pain is being marketed and sold to cater to the discreet masochism of the bourgeoisie (exactly the sentiments about pain I expressed above). All this is exaggeration of course, but only slightly.

Not entirely gratuitous picture above is of Sandrine Bonnaire in A Nos Amours. She occasionally smiles too.

The Metropolis and Mental Life

2008-10-13T18:48:00.005-05:00

I came across this essay by Georg Simmel, the German sociologist who is considered (along with Marx, Weber and Durkheim) to be one of the founders of the discipline. What he says in the essay is quite similar to the idea of rationalization of society and resulting problems of alienation and loss of individual identity as developed by Weber and the philosophy of commodity in Marx.

"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technology of life. The fight with nature which primitive man had to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. "

"Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new precision, a certainty in the definition of identities and differences, an unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements has been brought about in the relations of life-elements - just as externally this precision has been effected by the universal diffusion of pocket watches. "

Ennio Morricone Tracks

2008-10-12T00:10:00.002-05:00

First one is from an obscure euro-thriller ("giallo") Short Night of the Glass Dolls directed by Aldo Lado. It is a very interesting concept-thriller. In Prague an American journalist is is declared dead after a murder attempt but in reality he is only under some sort of coma. While in "coma" (or whatever state it is) he tries to remember and piece together the events leading to it. Pretty good. And this Morricone score is just fantastic.

Two other favourite Morricone scores:

Man with Harmonica from Once Upon a Time in the West

And the score for the sleazy and brutal slasher film What Have You Done to Solange? (which I wrote about here).

A radiant obsctacle in the path of the obvious

2008-10-11T23:19:00.002-05:00

From George Steiner's book on Heidegger:

"Martin Heidegger is the great master of astonishment, the man whose amazement before the blank fact that we are instead of not being has put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious. His is the thought which makes even momentary condescension toward the fact of existence unforgivable."

I think it is true for most great writing, not just Heidegger's philosophy. They all put radiant obstacles in the path of the obvious and make us rethink what we otherwise take for granted as commonsense or commonplace (including our own existence).

Another nice phrase I learned from the book : "Deken ist Danken" or "To Think is to thank".

It is an excellent introductory text. I will try to post some of my notes soon.

Meta Blog

2008-10-10T09:08:00.004-05:00

A personal update and some musings (can be skipped)...

I am moving back to India in a couple of weeks. I had decided to move back sometime mid of this year but it kept getting postponed. I can technically still stay but I feel it is now time to say goobye to this weightless and unheimlich life and go back to what is home. It is probably evident from the blog that where I am doesn't really decide what I blog about in any way (if that were the case my home would be somewhere in Europe of distant time) but I don't know if I will be able to blog as regularly I do once I am in India. I doubt if the readers of the blog even know where I actually live (or for that matter my nationality or academic background, job, age or even gender, well may be gender is easily guessable)! Susan Sontag in one of her interviews said that for her writing was a means of self-transcendence and not self-expression. Now before you start throwing stones in outrage, I am not comparing myself to her or calling this blog "writing" but in general I believe we all should strive to transcend our passive, imposed identities (language, religion, nationality, gender, really nothing should be off-limit), only then we can live our lives based on potentiality, rather than actuality.

Anyway just to set the record straight, for the first year of the blog's existence, I was in Chicago, which now that some time has passed, I remember fondly though at that time I hated it and thought it was driving me mad. It is a very beautiful city but also bleak and brutalizing. I sometimes regret that I should have utilized (or at least I should have tried harder) my time spent there better (by reading, thinking, blogging etc.) rather than looking through the window and wishing for apocalypse as I did most of the time. After spending around a month in India I came back to US, this time in Stamford (Connecticut). I feel a little better about the last two years spent here. A nice, small (but sufficient) library was practically next door to where I lived and of course new york city was not that far either, both of which I will miss when I leave.

The awareness of the passage of time naturally gives rise to anxiety, at least when one feels the need to account for the time that is already past. I have been able to read a lot, watch a lot of films, even been able to think about them a little, even record most of these in whatever hopeless manner, but all this has only made everything more uncertain and filled my head with more doubts than ever before. The thought of life that lies ahead of me now fills me with dread, which as philosophers (like Kierkegaard) say, is different from fear in the sense that it doesn't have any determinate object. It just is. Unlike fear it doesn't help me to act, on the other hand it is paralysing. This is the natural effect of spending too much time alone following the trail of your own thoughts. Social life or even the thought of being with someone makes me afraid. You open your mouth to talk and then realize that it is only garbage that is coming out. At work you talk about all sorts of technical things and realize that absolutely everything you say is pure and utterly meaningless nonsense. At least from reading these books I now have the vocabulary to talk about it. I can talk about how the fear of losing one's self leads to anxiety, how it is nothing but the terror of falling into the world. I can now quote Kierkegaard and Heidegger but to what purpose? May be just another case of "shameless intellectualism" as one of the commenters noted.

There was one long comment (I think early last year) that I got on this blog which, after granting that the blog is "useful" and "informative", ridiculed it by calling it "hopelessly bookish" and advised me to go out in the world and see for myself and then I will realize that, as he (or she) emphatically concluded, "life is not shit just because it is written in the books." I remember the comment because it was true and it stung me. All this talk of trying to learn how to live an "examined life" is mostly an exercise in self-delusion. There is too much "examination" and too little "life" and I spend time examining precisely because it helps me escape from the life. One reads about all the life-experiences, one is moved by their portrayals in films but when an opportunity comes in real-life to gather experience of one's own, one runs away in fear to take refuge again in representation and detached thinking. One likes to think that there is something important and personal at stake in thinking like that but that is again self-delusion.

I realize now that I have mixed up first, second and third person ("I", "You", "One") above which again shows how uncomfortable I feel writing things like these but I will let it be.

Meryl Streep on Bette Davis

2008-10-08T17:33:00.001-05:00

Meryl Streep paying tribute to Bette Davis...

Adventures in Pessimism

2008-10-08T14:29:00.002-05:00

(Some pessimistic musings after brief encounters with Heidegger...)

My scientific worldview has been under a lot of assault lately, so much so that I think at this rate I will have to apply for a religious conversion sometime (no, seriously). I have always been contemptuous of the Panglossian sermons of techno-evangelists and other gurus of optimism but a basic belief in the scientific worldview was always there and although I could clearly see that human history was full of calamities, I always took them to be mostly aberrations and temporary departures from the essential course of history, in short nothing that could be set right by a little thinking, foresight and historical understanding.

But what if thinking itself is the problem, or at least what we mean by "thinking"? And what if all those calamities are not departures but part and parcels of what we call civilization, in fact it is in them that we are able to see the true face of our civilization, and not what we call "wonders"? Wars, imperialism, slavery, genocide, mass murders, holocaust, environmental disasters, even small scale calamities which define our everyday reality - they all have something common in them, which is our relationship with the world, a relationship between subject and an object. This is the source of our estrangement and alienation from the world. All the knowledge gained by thinking through this subject-object prism is an objectified knowledge, knowledge appropriated from the world and not revealed by it on its own, the world treated as "a standing reserve". We might have revised Aristotelian categories but we have merely replaced one with another. Western Philosophy? Plato, Socrates, Aristotle were disasters and it is just a story of decline from that time.

In The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann says that the original calamity (or the "original sin") happened when matter got infected with life, and "that was our first step toward evil, toward lust and death". (Quote in full here). I sympathise with this idea though I think it is not really life that is malignant, it is rather one particular aspect of it - the consciousness or self-awareness. We could try to live a "primordial" or "reverential" existence but I don't know how that is to be done (going in a forest, taking sanyas, meditating?). (Like all philosopher-doctors Heidegger is better at diagnosing rather than treating the sickness). Or may be there is way out in our post-human future when human species is either extinct or replaced by a more primordial life form. Either way it is doom for us.

All This, and Heaven Too

2008-10-08T11:10:00.002-05:00

Anatole Litvak's 1940 film All This, and Heaven Too is a pretty good melodrama, though not nearly as successful as other Bette Davis vehicles of the same period like The Letter (my personal favourite), Jezebel or even the weirdly melodramatic Now, Voyager.

The film starts with Davis getting a job as a teacher in an all-girls school. The girls of her class however have found a newspaper report about an scandalous affair she was involved in when she was in France employed as a governess for children in the house of a duke (Charles Boyer). When the girls taunt her about her past she begins to tell them her life story and then we see the whole film in flashback. The story itself is nothing unusual or unexpected. The duke is exasperated by the nagging demands of his wife and his withdrawal has made her hysterical. The governess is unhappy and lonely too and exceptionally devoted to the children and, you know, the usual stuff...

What is interesting is that throughout the film their love affair (or non-affair) remains "chaste". They don't even kiss once! Davis keeps reminding herself and others (she is in any case telling a story) that whatever she did was for the children and she never had any ulterior designs on the duke but the director (and the audience) knows better. I think this is what makes it interesting. Like other women's films of that period, this also dramatizes issues which would interest feminists, like how insecurity and powerlessness find an expression in feminine jealousy. Also how unfair the distribution of power in a marriage is - the duke repeatedly denies his love to his wife driving her mad, bitter and vindictive and even leading to a cruel end.

Another interesting aspect of the film is its ending. In the end Davis is reunited with a young and good looking church minister who is interested only in an asexual friendship with her ("new kind of love", he calls it). I don't know in what ways this serves as wish-fulfillment for women audiences (most of classic hollywood melodramas were indeed wish fulfillment fantasies) but it is interesting to think about it.

Novel & Philosophy

2008-10-08T09:35:00.002-05:00

I don't really agree with this dismissal of philosophical novel, much less with the idea that a novel can't change your thinking about life and the world. I wonder, if that is the case, why take the novel seriously at all?

Later in the post he mentions (quoting John Dewey) that, "our encounter with art can be the most alert and engaged of human experiences. In our free perception of the aesthetic ... we reach a level of pure experience, and a degree of self-awareness of experience as experience, unavailable in most other human endeavors." This is a great way of of describing the experience of reading (or any aesthetic engagement) but why shouldn't we see this self-aware experiences as adding to our knowledge or questioning whatever knowledge of the self and the world we already had before we started reading, and taking it further, why shouldn't we let this knowledge change our lives?

As one of the comments there also mentions, taking Dostoevsky as an example weakens the argument. Dostoevsky wasn't just emobodying extant ideas in plots, characters and incidents, he was actively thinking, questioning and critiquing the dominant intellectual culture of his times (the whole project of modernity). Alongwith Kierkegaard and Nietzsche he is an early existentialist philosopher, someone who also influenced the popular French existentialist thinkers of the 20th century.

This is not just embodying ideas in plots and characters, it is more about finding a grounding for ideas which would seem abstract, academic and irrelevant otherwise. This is what a philosophical novel achieves. We are surrounded by theories and facts and ideas but only in a novel can we find a personal stake in those ideas (without necessarily subjectivizing them). Reading in that sense becomes a process of making those facts and theories "one's own" and "authentic". (Reading Heidegger has been messing up with my mind recently.) I actually also like philosophers or thinkers who write as if they had a personal stake in whatever they are writing and thinking.

Contra James Wood?

2008-10-08T08:42:00.003-05:00

There is a new blog which takes issues with the ideas and opinions of the esteemed literary critic James Wood. I found this post particularly provocative which makes the case for Wood as a (sort of) Blairite critic, promoting reification of literature by granting a phony respectability to the commodity of Novel by labelling it "literary":

"James Wood is the ideal critic for the era in which the novel comes to be defined by its marketing category; it is Wood, preeminently, who puts the fetishism back into the commodity. On the one hand, there’s a great leveling behind the scenes – “literary fiction” is just more product that needs to be moved, preferably in superstore bulk – but selling it is part of a system of “distinction” that depends on the appearance of hierarchy, so that customers get to consume status along with, say, the latest Claire Messud or Ian McEwan novel. Wood’s criticism stabilizes the hierarchy of genres by guaranteeing the literariness of “literary fiction”; his imprimatur allows the novel to appear to have transcended mere marketing. His reviewing functions as a kind of nominating process, in which select works of contemporary “literary fiction” are nominated into the pantheon of great literature that his essays about “classic” texts have already enshrined. Thus, to take just a few examples, Monica Ali, Marilynne Robinson, Jeffrey Eugenides, and of course McEwan get to share the dias with Virginia Woolf, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. Those stacks of Ian McEwan’s Saturday that you see on that Barnes and Noble table have hovering over them a halo that forms the blurb, “This Is Not A Commodity” —James Wood. And it’s 10% off! "

A Babylonian Madhouse

2008-10-06T11:10:00.002-05:00

An excerpt from Robert Musil's essay "Helpless Europe" collected in "Precision and Soul". More excerpts available on google books.

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[And] so we arrive at the present day. The life that surrounds us is devoid of ordering concepts. We are inundated by a jumble of facts from the past, facts from the specialized sciences, facts from life. Popular philosophy and topical discussion are either content with the liberal scraps of an unfounded faith in reason and progress, or invent the familiar fetishes of epoch, nation, race, Catholicism, the intuitive man - all of which share, negatively, a predilection for sentimental carping at the intellect and, positively, a need to seek a foothold, to find gigantic skeletons, however ethereal, on which to hang the impressions that constituted our one remaining bit of substance. (This is incidentally, one of the literary disputes over culture versus civilization; it is also one of the major reasons why Expressionism was not much more than a charade: a soil that remained fundamentally impressionist could nurture it no further.) So timid have we become in matters of straightforward judgment and the shaping of reality that we habitually come to view even the present as history. Every new "ism" that crops up is hailed as the harbinger of a new humanity, and the end of every school year rings in a new epoch!

Thus everything belonging to the realm of the mind finds itself nowadays in profound disorder. Acting from tradition, and hardly aware of the reasons anymore, people attack the spirit of facts and numbers without offering anything but its negation to replace it. For if we proclaim - and who doesn't to some degree? - that our age lacks synthesis, or culture, or a sense of religiosity, or community, this is hardly more than singing the praises of the "good old days," since no one can say what cultures, religions, or communities would look like today if our laboratories and airplanes and the whole mammoth body of our society were to include them within their synthesis, and not simply dismiss them as outdated. This is merely to demand that the present surrender itself. Uncertainty, enervation and a pessimistic cast are today the hallmarks of soul.

Naturally this is all reflected in an unprecedented intellectual fragmentation. Our age accommodates side by side and in totally uncoordinated fashion such oppositions as individualism and social solidarity, aristocracy and socialism, pacifism and militarism, the lionizing of "culture" and the bustle of civilization, nationalism and internationalism, religion and natural science, intuition and rationalism, and so on ad infinitum. Excuse the analogy, but our age has an upset stomach, and it keep regurgitating bits and pieces of the same food without digesting it. Even a casual glance reveals that this kind of antitypicality - this posing of problems as pairs of opposites, this agglomeration, or these "either-or" formulations - means that too little intellectual work is being done. There is in every either-or a certain naivete, which may well befit the evaluator but ill-becomes the thinker, for whom opposites dissolve in series of transitions. And indeed, corresponding to this mode of inquiry on the practical level, an intellectual profile of our society shows a splinter-group collectivism carried to the extreme. Every reading circle has it poet; the political parties of the farmers and the manual labourers have their different philosophies; there are perhaps a hundred publishing houses in Germany, each with its more or less loosely organized circle of readers; the clergy has its network, but the followers of [Rudolf] Steiner too have their millions, and universities their prestige. I once even read something in a waiters' union newsletter about how the weltanschauung of the restuarant worker must forever be upheld.

It is a babylonian madhouse; a thousand disparate voices, ideas, and tunes assault the wanderer's ear from a thousand windows at once, and it is clear that individual is turned into a playground of anarchic forces, and morality and the intellecet disintegrate. But in the cellar of this madhouse we hear the hammering of the a Hephaestian urge to create; humanity's archetypal dreams are being realized, like flight, our seven-league boots; seeing through solid bodies, and an incredible wealth of fantasies such as in centuries past were the blissful magic of dreams. Our age creates these wonders, but it no longer feels them. It is a time of fulfillment, and fulfillments are always disappointments; our time lacks a sense of longing, a sense of some challege it hasn't yet mastered, but which gnaws at its heart.

Two Classic Films

2008-10-05T13:47:00.003-05:00

Brief comments on two classic hollywood films with women protagonists both released in 1948 and both directed by Anatole Litvak. Both leading ladies even got Oscar nominations for their roles though none of them won. Olivia de Havilland would win the next year's Oscar for "The Heiress" (another great film, by the way). For Barbara Stanwyck it was just one of her total four nominations.

Anyway coming back to the first film. Andrea Dworkin in her book on pornography says that heterosexual culture under patriarchy is essentially homoerotic in nature. It is true that men do have sex with women but they reserve their love, which is based on mutual respect and admiration, for other men and that man's love for a woman is at its best a variation of paternalistic kindness and generosity (that is, when he is not busy beating, abusing, raping and murdering her).

Most of The Snake Pit feels like a conscious critique of this kind of heterosexual relationship. Virginia (played by Olivia de Havilland who is quite impressive and very pretty in an unshowy way) has had some "father-issues" while growing up as a kid because of which she is unable to accept the male love with its fatherly paternalism. The film begins when she is already in a mental asylum after suffering a nervous breakdown just after a few months of her marriage. She can't remember her past and her days go by as if in a haze. The doctor in charge of her "Dr. Kik" thinks it is a good idea to let her undergo eletroshock treatment which will help him establish "contact" with her so that then he can do his psychotherapy. Most of the story is then told in flashback as she reveals her life details to him and is then cured when she acknowledges all the messy details of her unconscious (usual Freudianism).

The tone of the film oscillates between that of personal psychological drama and a social problem film tackling the issues of mental illness in society and its proper treatment. We hear her monologues as voiceover (wonderfully voiced by Havilland) and we also see the doctors debating the proper course of treatment. Unlike many other films set in asylums it avoids cheap sensationalism and insensitive humour (it is still funny occasionally) while still maintaining a comfortable distance from truly harrowing nature of illness and treatment. (The electoshock therapy for example happens off camera). The overall effect then is much more palatable than Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, a film of the same period which deals with alchoholism.

Like most of the classical hollywood films of the period happy ending feels tacked on and mandatory. For most of these films one has to keep it in mind to truly appreciate the social critique the film offers. For example in this film, the whole story is how women are oppressed under paternalistic authority (even when it is kind and generous) but ultimately the good-natured psychotherapist cures her, to the extent that she even asks for her wedding ring from her husband when she gets out. The message being that women can maintain their sanity only when they give in and accept their position under patriarchy. Fassbinder, who was a huge fan of classical hollywood, said that he wanted to make films like the ones made in old hollywood but "without the hypocrisy." The ending in many of these old films feels hypocritical but as a viewer we can see it as demands of a repressive commercial ideology. It will also be interesting to compare it with Fassbinder's own Angst vor der Angst (Fear of Fear), which I wrote about here, his treatment of the same subject. Unlike the very model of sanity and rational composure and sensitivity, the psychiatrist in Fassbinder is a cold blooded villain who demands sex from Margit Carstensen in return of her medicine. A lot of the Freudianism presented in the film also seem dated even a little ridiculous. Fassbinder explicitly frames the image of Freud hanging from the wall to make it look like a stern patriarch looking down upon the hapless women, while in this film his image comes out like that of a wise and saintly figure. Anyway these criticisms aside, overall it is quite impressive in its treatment of a difficult subject, definitely worth watching.

I saw Sorry, Wrong Number last year but I thought I would mention it on the blog since it is not so well-known. This is the film you shouldn't read anything about before watching. Needless to say it has one of the most nailbiting and shocking climaxes in all of classical hollwood. (Very unlike the hypocritical endings I mentioned above). I am actually surprised that the censors even let it pass. Fans of Burt Lancaster will be in for a shock too, as he plays a craven minion, very unlike the macho-masculine roles he is famous for. Barbara Stanwyck is at her best here (and that is saying quite a bit). The film will feel very gimmicky in the beginning with its real-time story and flashbacks within flashbacks structure but the story really draws you in and doesn't let you go till the very end with the shocking revelation. This is a must-watch example of classic hollywood film-noir.

Heidegger on Idle Talk

2008-10-04T10:12:00.005-05:00

Relevant to Steve's complaint about blogging, which I linked in the previous post, something I came across in "Being and Time". Heidegger talks about how incessant chatter of culture and other public discourse harms and makes understanding difficult, because of its inauthenticity or "groundlessness", which he explains as talking about something "without previously making the thing one's own". At the same time he says that this mode of being is inescapably part of everyday reality for human beings. I couldn't find any commentary on it on internet but this gives a good overview.

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The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it encourages this. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one's own. If this were done, idle talk would founder; and it already guards against such a danger. Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer.

Discourse, which belongs to the essential state of Dasein's Being and has a share in constituting Dasein's disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk. And when it does so, it serves not so much to keep Being-in-the-world open for us in an articulated understanding, as rather to close it off, and cover up the entities within-the-world. To do this, one need not aim to deceive. Idle talk does not have the kind of Being which belongs to consciously passing off something as something else. The fact that something has been said groundlessly, and then gets passed along in further retelling, amounts to perverting the act of disclosing [Erchliessen] into an act of closing off [Verschliessen]. For what is said is always understood proximally as 'saying' something - that is, an uncovering something. Thus, by its very nature idle talk is a closing-off, since to go back to the ground of what is talked about is something which it leaves undone.

This closing-off is aggravated afresh by the fact that an understanding of what is talked about is supposedly reached in idle talk. Because of this, idle talk discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in a peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back. [...]

Idle talk, which closes things off in the way we have designated, is the kind of Being which belongs to Dasein's understanding when that understanding has been uprooted. But idle talk does not occur as a condition which is present-at-hand in something present-at-hand: idle talk has been uprooted existentially, and this uprooting is constant. Ontologically this means that when Dasein maintains itself in idle talk it is - as Being-in-the-world - cut off from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world, towards Dasein-with, and towards its very Being-in. Such a Dasein keeps floating unattached [in einer Schwebe]; yet in so doing, it is always alongside the world, with Others, and towards itself. To be uprooted in this manner is a possibility-of-Being only for an entity whose disclosedness is constituted by discourse as characterized by understanding and states-of-mind - that is to say, for an entity whose disclosedness, in such an ontologically constitutive state, is its "there", its 'in-the-world'. Far from amounting to a "not-Being" of Dasein, this uprooting is rather Dasein's most everyday and most stubborn reality.

Yet the obviousness and self-assurance of the average ways in which things have been interpreted, are such that while the particular Dasein drifts along towards an ever-increasing groundlessness as it floats, the uncanniness of this floating remains hidden from it under their protecting shelter.

Corralling literature

2008-10-04T09:46:00.003-05:00

Steve Mitchelmore on blogging:

"Rather than facing up to books as unique interruptions to daily life, newspaper book coverage has corralled literature into the interminable chatter of culture. Blogging follows."

Claire Denis: Trouble Every Day

2008-10-02T08:00:00.006-05:00

Are love and lust mutually contradictory ideas? Hannah Arendt (quoting St. Augustine) said that to her "I love you" meant the same as "I want you to be." Just affirming other's existence seems like nothing out of ordinary but there is something much deeper in the notion. Sexual desire by its very nature seems to imply that one uses other person for one's own gratification, which in turn is the same as denying other person's autonomy and identity as a human being. This was the main problem that Kant had with sex - he thought any non-procreative sex violated one of his categorical imperatives, which says "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end." (See here for more). He thought that recreational sex was morally permissible only under an explicit contract which to him was marriage and which he defined as, "the union of two persons of different sex for life-long reciprocal possession of their sexual faculties." Bummer, isn't it (and controversial too)?

Anyway coming back to the film in question, Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day takes the same notion of lust as extinguishing other's identity and autonomy to extremes. Actually the intellectual conceit in the film is nothing exceptional even though it may look like it at first glance. I mean one often hears the phrase "overcome by devouring lust", she just takes it to literal and very gory extremes. Yes, the film shows lust as (literal) cannibalism. Shane (played by Vincent Gallo sporting a terrific looking moustache) is in Paris for his honeymoon but there is an unspoken tension between him and his wife because they haven't consummated their marriage yet. He is harbouring a terrible secret that he can't speak of. Because of some mysterious experiment (never spelt out clearly) his sexual lust has transformed into a lust for flesh (literally). He is in Paris looking out for a certain Dr. Leos hoping to find a cure. The doctor is having a similar trouble at home because his wife Core (played by Beatrice Dalle, as usual at her nutty best) is plagued by a similar disease. She lures unsuspecting people using her body and then eats them. Talk about femme fatale!

As the story outline above would suggest the film is pretty extreme. I have seen two of her other films, Beau Travail and L'Intrus, both of which are similarly headscratching and very difficult films. Some would call her pretentious and deliberately frustrating (including me) but one can't deny the obvious skill and mastery of the craft on display. There is hardly any dialogue in this film, and even the few ones are totally non-expository. The editing is fragmented and full of narrative ellipsis so you will keep guessing what is happening and why someone is behaving the way they are. She doesn't explain anything in a straightforward manner. The other star of the film is her regular cinematographer Agnes Godard. She has such a great sense of texture and mood and beauty in surfaces. The other potentially frustrating thing would be to see it as a horror film. She does use motifs and ideas from horror genre but deliberately confounds viewer's expectations and not just because the tone is so distanced, cold and clinical. This will most certainly disappoint those who look for gore in horror films. There are actually only two scenes but both very graphic, which may inspire both disgust and laughter (at least it did to this viewer). Certainly a very interesting film and worth having an opinion on, even though one may not like it. I certainly didn't. May be David Cronenberg should have tried this idea. Crash - Part II? An essay on the film here which tries to place it in the horror genre.

Poster of the Day

2008-10-01T09:14:00.002-05:00

Andrzej Żuławski's Possession (a very strange horror film, strange in over-the-top, flirting-with-ridiculousness sort of way)

Heidegger on Technology

2008-09-30T15:30:00.004-05:00

This is an excellent tutorial explaining Heidegger's essay on technology, "The Question Concerning Technology".

The key word to understand the essay, as the tutorial explains it, would be "enframing" which as I understood it, means approaching the world through predefined categories rather than letting the world reveal or unconceal the truth on its own terms (which is actually the domain of art and poetry). This essay can also be seen as a critique of science itself though I think it is more valid in social sciences where methodologies and categories are more suspect and subject to constant questioning. Although it is also true that even in so-called "pure" sciences like Physics, modern advances have shown that previous categories are no longer valid or useful. The essay also makes it clear that techonological approach to the world precedes science and reverses the idea of technology as applied science. Somewhat related, an essay on environmental ethics which uses Heideggerian terminologies. I haven't read it in full but it looks interesting.

The Facebook Problem

2008-09-30T13:10:00.005-05:00

More thoughts on instrumentality...

Randomly blog hopping I came across this blog in which the blogger talks about why we should all cultivate a diverse set of interests because it helps us meet lots of, what she calls, "interesting and important" people. The post contains quite a few choice quotes. Sample this (attributed to some marketing guru I think):"if your goal is to develop long-term relationships with interesting people, to focus on those whose “stock prices” are low but long-term potential high." So okay, I am now a stock ticker. After a while she herself says, "Because it involves changing oneself, rather than leveraging other people in your social circle or communities." Yes, you heard it right, "leveraging other people" and then in the next line in blithe ignorance of any sort of irony she drops the name of Tolstoy!

This is sadly nothing unexpected and out of ordinary. You see this kind of thinking and approach to the world everywhere though it is probably at its most evident and egregious on social networking sites like orkut or facebook. People create their profiles and put all sorts of fancy names just to garner a kind of cultural cachet. So David Lynch becomes "David Lynch", a signifier which denotes that he or she likes offbeat films, a tag which then helps him or her in self-advertising - or building "relationships" with "interesting" people as the blog euphemestically puts it. This way the person himself agrees in his own commodification and instrumentalization - it is as if to mean that my identity is there only in relation to other people. There is no place for authenticity here.

I personally find social interactions extremely stressful and painful but I won't deny that interacting with other people is very important for one's own intellectual and emotional growth as a person and isolation can often lead to smugness, incoherence and cause a different sort of pain, among other things. (I mean interaction with real people, not the people who talk through their books or artworks, in that sense I do just fine). I had written about some of these aspects here, briefly touching on the idea about how people like to form relationships based on "comaptibility" and "type" while at the same time completely discounting the idea that relationships can mean opening up one's intellectual horizons and willingness to see the world through a perspective which is not one's own which is in direct contrast to the kind of relationship based on facebook profiles or any other sort of instrumentalized identity. This rather epistemological and ethical idea of relationship and social interaction has been replaced with a completely shallow and materialistic idea, which I find rather sad and even a cause of despair.

John Searle on Wittgenstein

2008-09-28T21:45:00.004-05:00

John Searle (trying to) explain Wittgenstein's philosophy on a TV program with Bryan Magee.

Lots of philosophy lessons available here. All of them look consistently brilliant and extremely helpful.

Two NYPL Discussions

2008-09-28T18:36:00.004-05:00

The meeting of two very trendy "thinkers" of our time Slavoj Zizek and Bernhard-Henri Levy was highly publicized by the new york public library but the discussion proved to be rather disappointing. No fistfights, just a series of "I Agree But...". The audio recording of the whole session is available here.

More interesting is this video interview of Zizek in which he explains the difference between "subjective" violence, that is the violence that is perpetrated by a subject (a specific agent) which destroys the normal order of things and "objective" violence by which he means the invisible, systemic violence inherent in the system itself which helps maintain the normal order of things. As an example he says that violence in a communist society is easy to identify (even though it often leads to games about the origins of violence, "From Plato to Nato" as he says) but the violence that keeps the capitalist society going is harder to identify. He later says a few interesting things about "divine" and "mythic" violence. The interview is in five parts all of which are available on youtube.

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Next day's discussion was between James Wood and Daniel Mendelsohn about the current state of the literary culture and health of mainstream criticism. Everybody seemed upbeat. At the end Mendelsohn makes some contentious points, at one place expressing his bemusement at the thought of how a million people with laptops all telling us their opinions on Moby Dick! He then mentioned a few words like authority and expertise and compared a normal person publishing a literary blog to him writing a blog about brain surgery! I will desist from expressing my outrage here. The discussion overall could have been better moderated. There was also a strange audience question asking if David Foster Wallace's suicide could be seen as a "literary gesture"!

Emil Cioran Essay

2008-09-27T14:00:00.005-05:00

This is an excellent introductory essay on the apocalyptic and gloomy Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. The site contains a few other writings which are available in English too.

I have a second-hand copy of his wonderfully titled collection of essays called "The Temptation to Exist" with a characteristically brilliant introduction by Susan Sontag. I have read only parts of it but to me the book felt like a symptom of exactly the same disease that he is diagnosing - the disease of thinking. There is also a somewhat contradictory attitude towards consciousness and thinking. On one hand he rages against relentless intellectualization which has left everything in ruins and brought us to the end of the world and here he has a lot in common with romantic and "vitalist" thinkers, even those German intellectuals who supported fascism before the war (he was himself a fascist in his youth). On the other hand he revels in the apocalypse and gloom and thunders at everybody who seem to go on with their lives as if nothing has happened.

It is a very interesting book, but one probably needs to be fully aware of Nietzsche and Heidegger to understand all of what he is saying. As for negativity I like it more when it is done in fiction, may be we should read it as fiction too - as a mind asserting its power, nothing else.

Most of Susan Sontag's introduction is available on google books.

Intelligence and Difficult Writing

2008-09-26T10:25:00.002-05:00

In the last couple of years or so I have tried to read philosophy but haven't been able to make much progress. Of course most of these efforts have been half-hearted and unsystematic but after all my struggle (and in most cases resulting in failure) with the texts I have come to the understanding that there are two things which are at the root of the problem: first, the technical background of my education in which we deal mostly with the "formal language" (consisting of mathematical symbols or something which can be transformed into that) which merely sounds like everyday English and second, is that we are surrounded by a culture in which language is used for the most narrow and shallow commonsensical purposes, like describing something which is obvious or expressing some proposition which can be verified and falsified by facts, or at best to play some games and have fun and other such things.

What we don't use language for is to use it to represent the process of thinking itself. What we also don't use it is to question the very foundations of our "reality." The commonsensical language already assumes things which are not obvious to these philosophers and thinkers. I had for example copied a passage from Heidegger which (understandably I think) outraged some of the readers. His language is so strange because he is questioning the most basic of statements that we make with blase indifference (like the statements starting with "something is...").

I think it is ultimately the responsibility of the readers to make that extra effort and be prepared to struggle to understand the texts. I remember reading an article about German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who was notorious for being deliberately obscure and difficult, which defended his style by explaining that he was merely trying to resist the commodification of language, commodification that is so endemic to our culture, which one can see in newspapers, advertising and all the popular culture which are all built around systematic abuse of language. I can't find the link now but it was probably an article by Judith Butler where she was responding to being awarded a "bad writing prize." To call these writers elitists and obscurantist to me is not fair (though some of them may surely fit the bill.) Also sometimes you do need language which is merely utilitarian (in the shallow way) like in journalism for example and in that case surely one must avoid all complexities and potential ambiguities. (The "Politics and English Language" Essay by George Orwell is deservedly a classic making the same argument.)

Then there is the idea of thinking itself. Again as a victim of a purely technical education we are merely taught this most abstract and impersonal kind of thinking. It basically involves these two steps. 1) Take the problem and transform it into a language consisting only of mathematical symbols and 2) Use all the symbol manipulation tricks you learned in the mathematics class to transform the problem to some problem which you have already solved or to a theorem you have already proved. That's the only kind of thinking one does. (If it sounds mechanical that's not surprising. A subtopic in theoretical computer science deals with automated proving.) The one who is most efficient at doing this is called an "intelligent person". Thinking which makes one question one's personal experiences in particular and extract some general essence out of them is a completely foreign concept. The same is a thinking which tries to question the most fundamental of assumptions about what our "reality" is.

Coming back to philosophy I think the main problem also is that one needs to treat it as a whole subject and start from bottoms up like one does in science and mathematics. One needs to learn how to philosophize (that is learn to read from all over again), then only one can grasp whatever is going on in those texts. I also think it is extremely important for technical people to learn to philosophize (and not just because it helps in living an "examined life" though that is of course the most important) but it also makes their lives more fulfilling. For example if you get into an argument about ethics with these people you will be asked for "data" or "empirical proof". This is exactly the kind of shallow utilitarian rationality that philosophizing can cure us of.

Negative Thinking

2008-09-25T12:04:00.003-05:00

The New York Times has a nice op-ed article by Barbara Ehrenreich about the value of negative thinking:

"Americans did not start out as deluded optimists. The original ethos, at least of white Protestant settlers and their descendants, was a grim Calvinism that offered wealth only through hard work and savings, and even then made no promises at all. You might work hard and still fail; you certainly wouldn’t get anywhere by adjusting your attitude or dreamily “visualizing” success.

Calvinists thought “negatively,” as we would say today, carrying a weight of guilt and foreboding that sometimes broke their spirits. It was in response to this harsh attitude that positive thinking arose — among mystics, lay healers and transcendentalists — in the 19th century, with its crowd-pleasing message that God, or the universe, is really on your side, that you can actually have whatever you want, if the wanting is focused enough."

If you haven't read her essay on the idiotic motivational self-help books, you must do so before anything else.

12 films I want to see...

2008-09-24T22:23:00.004-05:00

There is a "meme" circulating in the film blogosphere about 12 films that you haven't seen and want to. (See here for Glenn Kenny's list). These are supposed to be obscure and difficult to see but in my case the selections are (comparatively) well-known, as befits a budding cinephile I guess. Actually quite a few of these don't seem to be available on DVD. Criterion is soon releasing the dvd of the Ophuls along with some of his other films which I hope I will finally get to soon. There are of course a lot more films I haven't seen and want to but these are the ones which came to my mind when I thought of films about which I am very curious and also which I feel are "gaps." Soviet cinema is of course a major gap, and quite unforgivable one. I have so far seen only Battleship Potemkin.

1. The Earrings of Madame De... (Max Ophuls)
2. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)
3. Ivan the Terrible I&II (Sergei Eisenstein)
4. Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin)
5. Before the Revolution (Bernardo Bertolucci)
6. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone)
7. Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
8. Odd Man Out (Carol Reed)
9. Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
10. Senso (Luchino Visconti)
11. The Dead (John Huston)
12. Poison (Todd Haynes)

Defending Losers

2008-09-24T09:27:00.002-05:00

This is an old interview of Amit Chaudhuri but I found this bit interesting and worth highlighting:

Q: Do you think Indian writing has also suffered as a result of the country's modernizing and globalizing zeal?

A: For me the position of the outsider is of great importance to the health of any society. For any cultural practice, whether it's academic or literary, the position of the outsider, the misfit, the daydreamer and even of failure are very important categories in the creation of a truly energetic and self-critical social and intellectual space. They are important components because of the latent critique of power that they have in constituting our imaginative life.

My anxiety is that in the last 20 years India, typically for a globalizing country, hasn't theorized a position for the outsider or for the misfit or for failure. Its rhetoric is concerned with success in various ways. So Indian writing in English or any other phenomenon is always spoken in terms of success and if it is not successful, it becomes invisible.

Right now we do not have a space for the irresponsible misfit, which means we do not have a space which is at an angle to power. Even those who speak against power are in some ways in powerful positions of their own. In India, everybody is some way in some kind of nexus of power. We need to regain that space for the irresponsible.

On Instrumental Reason

2008-09-23T15:19:00.003-05:00

Listening to so many people these days, on blogs, in newspapers, in person everywhere in fact, it seems as if the only thing that is wrong with this world is that the "incentives" are not in the right place. Once you get the incentives right everything will fall into its rightful place! It makes me want to start ranting like Dostoevsky's Underground Man who was railing against the same kind of utilitarian and (shallow) rationalist thinkers in nineteenth century.

This is also I think reflects a general trend in modern societies - the growing influence of "instrumental reason" in human affairs and progressive rationalization of our social institutions. Even legal thinkers who should be concerned with ethical questions are more worried about material outcomes of any law. Also related to this is the fact that both people with backgrounds in Economics (at least those involved in policy and planning) and Management are in the positions of power and in control of the decision making bodies, two disciplines which are based mostly on instrumental thinking. (Engineering is of course the most prominent example of instrumental reasoning but thankfully they are generally not very influential, although many people in management do have backgrounds in engineering.)

One immediate effect of this has been the gradual disappearance of ethical vocabulary from the public sphere - it is as if our language itself has been depleted. I wanted to mention it in the post where I linked to an essay on "virtue ethics." Now it feels strange to even talk of something inherently good or virtuous or an act worthy of condemnation. You need to justify it in terms of the material outcomes of any action. On top of that all we get is the talk of "rights." Everyone has to right to do what he or she pleases to do so long as it doesn't interfere in the rights of others to do the same. This kind of liberalism robs us of our shared ethical precepts and vocabularies and it results in atomised society. One is free but it is a very lonely kind of freedom and a recipe of despair.

Coming back to underground man, his main grouse with people like Mill or Chernyshevsky was that their thought didn't take his freedom and identity into consideration. They didn't realize that one could choose to act even against one's own narrow material interests just to assert one's freedom and identity. In fact it is only in that choice that true meaning of morality lies. By the same logic an incentivized and rationalized society basically is an agent of dehumanization - because it robs human beings of their identities and freedom.

It is also from this perspective that I find the success of (pseudo-)Economics books which use the same homo economicus cliches to explain human affairs and the general public discourse which use similar language so depressing. If there is a more vulgar and philistine idea than "human being as utility maximizing automaton" ever thought by a human brain, I would like to know about that. The popular interpretations of Darwinian theories fall in the same category. Only this time it is not the material interests but rather biological interests (which are worse because they are supposed to be "hardwired" in the brain.) I must say that it is only the popularisers and journalists who interpret these theories that I find vulgar. I don't have any problems with these scientific disciplines or the real thinkers who must be aware of these philosophical issues.

All of this sounds very amateurish but this is also something that troubles me a lot personally. I think it is the primary source of alienation in our societies because it comes from the realization that our lives are instrumentalized as well. We are required to justify all of our actions in material terms as well, or some such notion defined in "rational" terms. This is also the reason why I find so much solace in art and literature and even blogging. You sell yourself everyday as alienated labour just so that you can buy some stupid shit. Blogging then feels like an escape, an escape into freedom.

Prince Friedrich of Homburg

2008-09-21T23:09:00.001-05:00

Prince Friedrich of Homburg was the last work published by Kleist before he committed suicide. It couldn't be staged however as it was thought by the officials that the play could have demoralizing effect on the army. It was ironic because Kleist himself meant it to be seen as a patriotic play. His biographers believe that the failure of the play was one of the factors which aggravated his despair and was a decisive factor in making him take that drastic step.

The excellent introduction in the new directions press edition of the play also talks about his "Kant crisis". In brief, although he was always shy, awkward and hyper-sensitive as a young person, he basically had an optimistic temperament and believed in self-improvement and self-perfection through literature (which was one of the foundations of classical German culture). Then he came across the works of Kant, specially his distinctions between how things appear and how things really are. He interpreted it to mean that human mind could never reach the ultimate truth and will forever be condemned to live with lies and illusions. This philosophical despair combined with a series of failures in the real life led him to the end when he took his own life in a suicide pact with a woman who was suffering from a terminal disease.

Prince of Homburg is considered to be one of the key texts of German drama though I found it slightly underwhelming. It doesn't really have the shattering power of Georg Buchner's Woyzeck which came a couple of decades later (which I wrote about here). In a series of short scenes through multiple acts the play dramatizes how the eponymous Prussian prince wins the war against Sweden but is condemned to death by a military court because he didn't follow the military law by the book. (He basically took charge of the cavalry mistakenly thinking that the Elector was dead). Rest of the play charts his emotional state as it changes from abject terror and despair as a he faces certain death to exultation and feeling of glory after he rationalizes his death by seeing the law of the state as the absolute, objective law - kind of, state as the secular alternative for God himself. Modern readers can't help but think of German authoritarianism which lauded similar principles of individual subjection and sacralization of state and its laws. For this reason many critics think it is a proto-fascist play.

The introductory essay however says that this is a shallow and easier political interpretation and the real, more interesting way to read it as the dramatization of an individual response to the certainty of death, in a world bereft of transcendence.

Since man is psychologically incapable of dying for nothing, the problem facing the Prince becomes one of finding a way to affirm his death. For, if it is a noble pursuit to give one's life meaning, it is an absolute necessity to give meaning to one's impending death. The key to such a psychological tour de force is guilt. It is the affirmation of personal guilt before an absolute - be it God, the father, or the state - that makes it possible for the individual to walk rather than be dragged to the place of execution. By means of this psychological process, death is not only transformed into a just punishment imposed from outside, it also gives the guilty individual the welcome opportunity to atone and cleanse himself. In Prince Friedrich of Homburg, the crucial step in this process of "personalizing" death occurs when the Prince reverses his earlier protestations of innocence and outrage and admits: "Guilty, grave guilt lies heavily upon me."

The essay also compares the Prince character to a few others in German literature most notably in Kafka's story The Judgment. (Kafka claimed him as one of his influences and even called him his "spiritual companion")

By a process of voluntarily accepting guilt and punishment, these characters believe that their lives, previously marked by mere personal desire and petty whim, have been transformed and crowned by a higher meaning. Self-negation is the price of providing one's existence with transpersonal value, a value that can only be bestowed from outside by an absolute. Although the personal cost is the highest conceivable, the individual, by negating the self, liberates himself from the terrors inherent in the thoughts of personal extinction.

Finally a short extract from the play:

Prince: Life, as a dervish once said, is a journey and a short one at that. First we rise six feet above the earth and then lie six feet under. But I now want to settle down somewhere in between. Today a man can carry his head proudly upon his shoulders. By tomorrow it may tremble on his neck and lie the next day on his feet. They say, of course, the sun also shines in the next world and upon brighter fields than ours. It's only pity that the eye must rot before it can see such splendors.

The Third Man - Documentary

2008-09-21T22:45:00.002-05:00

Great documentary on The Third Man. Link to next sections are in the "details" of the video.

Sebald Conference Report

2008-09-21T10:46:00.003-05:00

via complete review, a brief report in The Independent about a recent conference on W G Sebald's works at the university of east anglia:

"The main debate, it seemed, was over genre. The essayist from Utah claimed him for his tribe, as he put it. The novelist from Missouri said he was clearly in hers. The Hungarian poet put him in poetry. Down on the seafront at Southwold, which is described in The Rings of Saturn and whither his colleague and oldest friend, Professor Turner, led a coach party, one understood him suddenly as a great spinner of yarns."

The Desperate City Wives

2008-09-20T16:57:00.004-05:00

I think this is probably meant as a satire though I am not 100% sure. This might be authentic and sincere too, you never know how self-involved the yuppie scum of our megapolises can really get.

In any case it will make you laugh (unless you are feministically oriented in which case parts of it can make you cringe).

"Even as they hope they won't have to, they are making plans to economise. City wives are tougher and more practical than a lot of people realise. They are not celebrities. They are managers - plenty of them once worked in the City themselves. Economy also means home management, and already they will be preparing for some very tough cuts, though not all their decisions will make sense to outsiders.

Which holiday should they cancel first? Skiing, because it's the shortest, coldest and most expensive. How soon can they get out from under the lease on the country house - or, if the penalties for breaking it are too great, should they spend all their holidays there while the lease lasts?

Who can they let go from the staff? Most would rather do without the nanny than without the cleaner. With any luck the cleaner likes children anyway and will help out in a pinch. If there is a cook, she goes before the nanny. The cleaner also knows how to roast a chicken and wash up. Forget the garden altogether - expect to see a lot of weeds as the crisis worsens - although the unemployed may take some comfort in doing the gardening themselves. Shopping ... they have been meaning to cut down on shopping for years. Haircuts, though, they can't do without. "

The Negation of Male Subjectivity

2008-09-19T12:35:00.005-05:00

It is disappointing to see that there are so few books in "gender studies" section (at least in the library I go to) which deal with masculinity and "men's issues." That's why I was surprised to find Kaja Silverman's "Male Subjectivity on the Margins" in the feminism and gender studies section of the library. It is actually true that many feminist books also talk about masculinity but they don't go farther than labelling conventional and normative masculinity as pathological and diseased in its pursuit of power, aggression and violence.

Silverman is one of those academic film theorists who are totally up-to-date with the jargons and theories of French philosophers (specially Foucault and Lacan) and as a result parts of it went over my head. I still picked it up because it contained an essay on two of my favourite films by Fassbinder : Berlin Alexanderplatz and In a Year of Thirteen Moons. (Not recommended to Fassbinder newbies or those with weak emotional constitution). The essay is titled "Masochistic Ecstasy and Ruination of Masculinity in Fassbinder's Cinema" and like other essays it also talks about how difficult (or in Fassbinder's case how impossible) it is for anyone to live with a "deviant" masculinity, with a male subjectivity that says "no" to power and other normative male ideals within our current cultural order. She also quotes an academic essay by critic Leo Bersani rather alarmingly titled "Is rectum a grave?" in which she supposedly explains why "rectum is a grave in which the masculine ideal of proud subjectivity is buried." Some of it sounded a little too bizarre to a newbie like me but this essay is supposed to be very influential and controversial. The main idea from as far as I could understand is that men always act from a position of differentiated power and as a result any relationship with such a being can only be masochistic. Male homosexuality is then nothing but an expression of male masochism. She talks about how Fassbinder's questions this need for "phallic sustenance" and then shows how impossible it is to live without it in the society as it is now. There are also other essays on Proust, Lawrence of Arabia, Henry James and one in which she talks about varieties of homosexualities which I have not read yet. To make sense of most of these one needs to be fully conversant with the theories of Foucault and Lacan which I am not.

An extract from the Fassbinder essay here before I return the book back:

In subjecting the central characters of In a Year of Thirteen Moons and Berlin Alexanderplatz to castration and amputation, Fassbinder also violates the integrity of what Henri Wallon would call the "body schema," that visual and postural composite which traces the corporeal outlines of the "self." Moreover, not content merely to effect a radical and ultimately unreadable reconfiguration of its protagonist's "literal" body, In a Year of Thirteen Moons insists upon dismantling as well its virtual image, the moi, That film is so relentlessly de-idealizing in the scrutiny it brings to bear both upon body and ego that the male psyche is stripped not only of symbolic, but of libidinal support.

This de-idealization represents both Fassbinder's attempt to demonstrate just how bereft of narcissistic sustenance a subject like the central character of In a Year of Thirteen Moons would be within the present cultural order, and the means by which that film further dismantles male subjectivity. In other words, the film critiques our existing system of sexual differentiation for its inability to accommodate a figure who can be assimilated neither to masculinity nor to femininity, while at the same time maximizing the intransigence of these categories in such a way as to undermine utterly any gesture on its protagonist's part toward the recovery of a phallic identification. For this reason, In a Year of Thirteen Moons entertains a highly ambivalent relation to the pain it dramatizes.

Unlike the film with which I am pairing it, Berlin Alexanderplatz never manages to move its central character into a space definitively beyond normative male subjecitivity. That text is caught in a complex double bind; although it is unwaveringly committed to the annihilation of conventional masculinity, it is also profoundly pessimistic about the possibility of achieving that goal. Berlin Alexanderplatz thus works at the same time to negate male subjectivity, and to negate the possibility of that negation. The end result is a kind of arrestation at the site of suffering. Not surprisingly, in both In a Year of Thirteen Moons and Berlin Alexanderplatz that site is susceptible to extreme eroticization.

In pursuing Fassbinder's negativity to its outer limits, we will consequently find ourselves transported, from time to time, into certain "pleasure zone" - lifted up and out of despair into a kind of delirious joy which is that negativity's other side, and which alone makes it endurable. Both the absolutely refusal of Fassbinder's cinema to provide affirmation, and the access which it periodically yields to a masochistic ecstasy or psychic sublation, locate it in some curious way within another corporeality.

Virtue Ethics

2008-09-19T10:18:00.003-05:00

There is a great essay in the Prospect defending "the virtue ethics." Really must read. (I wonder if the wall street guys even know what it is or whether their course books on business ethics even mentions this. Consequentialism and vulgar utilitarianism has become so much like common sense that for most of us it is difficult to think about these ideas with any seriousness.):

"The ethical traditions of the pre-modern world focused on those qualities of character making for a good and happy life—the virtues. The exact nature of these virtues was open to dispute. The ancient Greeks singled out courage, temperance, prudence and justice. Christians added faith, hope and charity to the list, and downgraded pride (for the pagans a virtue) to a vice. Other virtues have had a more temporary vogue. The Renaissance favoured boldness, the Puritans thrift and industry. The east has traditions of its own. Confucius stressed filial piety, Lao Tse spontaneity. But all agreed that the virtues—some virtues—must lie at the heart of the moral life.

The virtues, for these pre-modern traditions, are the natural excellences of the species. They are to us what speed is to the leopard or strength to the lion; they are not matters of choice or self-expression. [....]

These various pre-modern traditions, eastern and western, represent a style of thinking about ethics that has become almost unintelligible to us. Under the influence of Mill and others, we have come to think of morality as a system of rights and obligations, and the philosophical problem as one of defining these rights and obligations. But where there is no right or obligation, morality is silent. A man who, having fulfilled his obligations to others, settles down with a six-pack to watch porn on television all day may be foolish, disgusting, vulgar and so forth, but he is not strictly speaking immoral. For he is, as the saying goes, "within his rights."

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

2008-09-18T14:35:00.005-05:00

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner directed by Tony Richardson is another extremely impressive entry from the "British New Wave" of the early 60s. I also read the original short story by Alan Sillitoe recently which is quite good as well. The film relates the story of a teenager named Colin Smith, an "angry young man" somewhat familiar from other films of the period too, who is sent to a reformatory school after getting caught for a petty crime. There he is identified and selected by the governor of the school (played by Michael Redgrave) to run in an long distance cross-country marathon championship. Most of the story is told in flashblacks, as he practices for his long distance run, which shows episodes from his life before his arrest - the grim family and social life and occasional fun and happiness with his friends. But when the time comes on the final finish line he realizes a great chance to assert his freedom (not the literal freedom but freedom of spirit and individuality) and the oppositional anti-establishment stance. The ending is pessimistic and bleak but paradoxically also very inspiring and empowering.

What I loved in this film (and other films from the period) was its tone - the disaffected, hyper-articulate and angry voice of protest against the authority and the society: sort of working-class Holden Caulfield with hyper sensitive class awareness. I also loved the B&W cinematography which makes the grim outdoor locations look so evocative. And not to forget the sheer bloody-minded and totally anti-Hollywood style endings. Two weeks after I have still been thinking about "Billy Liar," the character Tom Courtenay played in the film of the same name (which I wrote about here). He is equally wonderful in this film. Every body gesture, every single twitch of the face (I am already in love with his smile, even though he smiles very rarely) conveys something complex and profound. Nothing is ever wasted. He is probably more well-known in Britain where he has been active on stage for many years but he really deserves celebration outside as well. His performance in both films has already become one of my all-time favourites.

*******

A few words About the story by Alan Sillitoe (who wrote the screenplay for the film too). It is written in the first person and film pretty much follows it closely. The outdoor locations feel much more evocative and powerful in the film and so does Tom Courtenay's performance which transcends the character written in the story. On the other hand there are some wonderful monologues and eloquent diatribes some of which are there in the film too but the story has more of them. At one place in the film Colin rages, "Do you know what I'd do if I had the whip hand? I'd get all the coppers, governors, posh whores, penpushers, army officers and members of parliament and I'd stick them up against this wall and let them have it 'cause that's what they'd like to do to blokes like us." There is more of this in the book. It also helps to read the book imagining that particular accent, it becomes much more interesting and powerful then. It is written in a straight-forward way but it is the kind of writing whose authenticity and genuineness of the voice you feel in the gut and you don't feel the need to do any "close reading." Both story and the film highly recommended.

Critics are Them. Bloggers R Us.

2008-09-18T09:27:00.002-05:00

A hilarious article on film critics. Absolutely must read.

The picture above is of Addison DeWitt, the "great" drama critic in All About Eve, played by George Sanders.

Machado de Assis

2008-09-17T08:54:00.003-05:00

There is an article in New York Times about the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis on the occasion of his death centenary. Rather coincidentally I am in the middle of reading his novel "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" which has to be one of the most hilarious books I have read in a long time. It is hard to summarize but it is sort of Brazilian Tristram Shandy (he explicitly mentions it as one of his influences in the preface). I will try to write about it in more detail when I am done with it but for now here is the synopsis from the book to whet the appetite of those who haven't read it. (Susan Sontag also wrote an essay on the novel which is collected in "Where the Stress Falls".) And of course you can't but love a book which starts with a "dedication" like this: "To the Worm/Who/Gnawed the Cold Flesh/of My Corpse/I Dedicate/These Posthumous Memoirs/As a Nostalgic Remembrance"

********

"Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the extraordinary narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. "The gaze of public opinion, that sharp and judgmental gaze, loses its virtue the moment we tread the territory of death. I'm not saying that it doesn't reach here and examine and judge us, but we don't care about the examination or the judgment. My dear living gentlemen and ladies, there's nothing as incommensurable as the disdain of the deceased." Indeed, writing his memoirs from the other world gives Bras Cubas a certain freedom from both social and literary conventions. And while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.

Famous in his lifetime and still revered throughout Latin America, Machado de Assis has remained little known in the English-speaking world. He represents an important antecedent for the experimental fictions of Borges, Cortazar, Fuentes, and others. In this wildly inventive book, de Assis is, in fact, much closer to such postmodern masters as Calvino, Kundera, and Marquez than to the conventions of the nineteenth century realist and romantic novel, which the narrator continually and hilariously mocks.Irrepressibly whimsical, irreverent, chatty, and charmingly self-absorbed, Bras Cubas is forever intruding into his narrative, questioning, lecturing, and elbowing the reader, commenting on his writing and its highly unusual style--"this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble,yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble, and fall"--congratulating himself on particular chapters, wondering whether to cut others out, and interrupting his life story with all manner of digressions, from a philosophical discourse on the purpose of the nose to a visionary ride on the back of a rhinoceros to find the origin of the centuries. Along the way we're treated to a marvelous cast of characters, including the outlandish philosopher Quincas Borcas, who asserts that "asceticism is the perfection of human idiocy," and Virgilia, the beautiful married woman with whom Bras Cubas carries on a passionate and not-so-secret love affair. By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave. It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it.

Schadenfreude on Wall St.

2008-09-16T09:16:00.003-05:00

I know it is rather insensitive of me, and in fact downright foolish because I am one of those people directly affected, but somehow looking at today's wall street journal (from a distance, I absolutely never touch it) gave me a lot of satisfaction and pleasure. So finally some lesson for those snooty and arrogant morons with their endless gadget-talk and other bottomless stupidities. I used to spend a lot of time with those guys, some of them so-called "friends" but no so much now. Things will get back to normal and as they always were - there is no doubt about that but it is still a nice feeling. I know this will probably be interpreted as a cheap-shot - resentment of lowly guy in IT & Operations against those who made it big but what the hell. Now back to the stupid work I was doing and thinking about "Aesthetics of Negativity in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz." (A long post on the same coming up later this afternoon.)

Somewhat related, you must read this post on lenin's tomb - a response to a career advice article about how "office gossip and banter is costing the UK £43 billion a year". Now isn't that too bad? Don't miss the comments. I don't indulge in gossip or banter but I do see my office mostly as a free broadband service. My own, rather measly that's granted, way of rebelling against the capitalist tyranny.

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-14T22:59:00.003-05:00

I suppose there will be more detailed obituaries and appreciations later on. For now I liked the one in Salon and the one in new york times is also good, if somewhat perfunctory.

"He talked about how difficult it was to be a novelist in a world seething with advertisements and entertainment and knee-jerk knowingness and facile irony. He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism -- because not even the most merciless self- examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing. He tried so hard to be sincere and to attend to the world around him because he was excruciatingly aware of how often we are merely "sincere" and "attentive" and all too willing to leave it at that. He spoke of the discipline and of the abrading, daily labor such efforts require because the one imperative that runs throughout all of his work is the intimate connection between humility and wisdom."

New York Times has also put together a page which links to reviews of his books and also links to a few essays written by him, including one he wrote on Federer.

My acquaintance with his writing so far has been limited to a few of his essays. I specially loved his essay on David Lynch (partly because I am quite familiar with the subject and share his enthusiasm too). His essays like his fiction are quite "offbeat" too, and not just because they are full of footnotes, which sometimes occupy more than half of the page (and sometimes even full page)! In fact they can be downright annoying to those looking for straightforward argumentation and reportage. The David Lynch essay moves back and forth between an overview of Lynch's career and behind the scenes reportage from the sets of Lost Highway and in between offers critical commentary on his work (mainly Blue Velvet) in the context of contemporary avant-garde art. He says that Blue Velvet was enormously influential to him when he was a student because Lynch's work showed him how experimentalism is needed first of all to "honour the truth" rather than to prove an academic point or, in his case, merely as a medium of expressing a displeasure with the prevalent "commercial realism of new yorker school" as he was trying to do then. His essay on "Television and American Fiction" also talks about the ubiquity of irony in contemporary mainstream culture and how that mixed with irreverence, ridicule and empty experimentalism generates despair and results in a "cultural stasis." Both of these essays are collected in a volume titled "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again." The title essay refers to a magazine piece he wrote about a trip on a luxury carribean cruise in which, among other things, he talks of how one has to relinquish any sort of agency or self-consciousness and is in effect forced to have fun. I didn't read the whole thing (it suffers from a rather acute case of footnote-mania) but it is quite good. His next essay collection also had a great short essay on Dostoevsky which in effect lamented the impossibility of any contemporary writer even attempting to do what Dostoevsky did. It was again a critique of indifference and irony which pervades mainstream culture. Pankaj Mishra wrote a good review of the book in New York Times.

Pedro Paramo

2008-09-13T10:29:00.003-05:00

I read this novel a couple of months back but somehow I missed blogging about it. This is the kind of the book which is very hard to summarize and to pin it down to its plot or sundry "themes" feels like betraying the spirit of the work. I won't let myself be deterred by that however. I will also recommend this essay to those who are interested which goes into a lot of background detail and also offers some interpretations in the context of socio-political history of modern Mexico.

The novel begins with a young man named Juan arriving in a remote village called Comala in search of his father Pedro Paramo. He has come there because his mother entreated him before dying to visit her husband to "make him pay, for all those years he put us out of his mind" and claim what "belongs to you". While on his way, he meets a man who says that he is a son of Pedro Paramo too and that their father is dead! He shows Juan the way to a woman's house where he can stay. When he meets the woman she tells him that she already knew of his arrival because his mother told her so! She also expresses her regrets because she couldn't keep the promise that she has made with his mother, the promise that "we'd die together" and "That we would go hand in hand, to lend each other courage on our last journey - in case we had need for something, or ran into trouble."

After these first few pages the narrative becomes much more bewildering and complex. Juan learns that Comala is actually a ghost town and all the human figures that he comes across are spirits who only have "voices". What makes it specially strange is that all those voices that we hear in the story are never grounded in conventional realistic descriptions of the appearance. As Susan Sontag in her short introduction to the book, rather startlingly, says, "Being dead, they have nothing to express except their essence." I think this is the key to understanding how the novel works and how we should see the ghostly figures. These people are dead (or in fact some have left the village and migrated which in effect is the same) but their memories, dreams, sorrow and suffering continue to remain there in order to haunt the landscape of Comala. It is actually hard to figure out everything from a single reading but from their fragmented voices a picture does start to emerge of a place made desolate by outside forces and also of the main character of Pedro Paramo himself who turns out to be one of those tragically macho characters that latin american novels are so full of (including quite a few who are political dictators).

Rulfo initially wanted to call it "The Whispers" which would have been a perfect title because it accurately captures the experience of reading all those voices and fragmented monologues. I think Susan Sontag's comment also captures what makes it so different from a realistic novel. In general novels which have fantastic elements are still bound a realistic form and mode of language - a language which tries to capture the surface details accurately and in detail, trying to give it an illusion of the real. This novel also feels real despite its fantastic elements but not because Rulfo wants to create an illusion of the real. His style is extremely spare and minimalistic (free of all the pseudo-literary verbiage that vitiates so much of mainstream contemporary novels) and I think that's what makes it so special and that's why it succeeds.

This is another essay in The Nation which I found very helpful. It also lists various possible interpretations of the story which again goes to show how important is it to read it with enough context:

"Innumerable interpretations have been spun about Pedro Páramo. It has been said to represent, embody, allegorize or illuminate: the times of Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship, the social context of the Revolution, patriarchal rancher culture and the repression of women, the poetic qualities of rural speech, Mexico's relationship with death, the lingering influence on Mexicans of Aztec cosmology, Mexican deruralization and the ghost towns it created, Mexican culture, Mexican history, Mexican modernity, universal myths and archetypes. All of these interpretations are right, except those asserting that they alone are right. For me, the novel is about the Novel: the wonders of storytelling, the power of the literary word that spins so fast it never lets the reader catch it."

Complete Review also has a review and gathers some links to other reviews and essays.

Not surprisingly it has been adapted into a film too. There are stage versions as well. Youtube seems to have the film in its entirety but unfortunately there are no subtitles. I did however see the first half hour or so of the film because it follows quite closely to the story in the book. It is actually quite impressive. There are also talks of another version which is coming out in which Gael Garcia Bernal is involved. I wonder whether he plays father or the son.

The Trolley Song

2008-09-12T17:52:00.003-05:00

"The Trolley Song" from Meet Me in St. Louis...

I was looking at this AFI list of 100 greatest songs in Hollywood films which reminded me of another song I had almost forgotten: Suicide is Painless from MASH. This song was written by Altman's son when he was a teenager. I don't know if there is any connection between this and the teenager played by Lindsay Lohan in A Prairie Home Companion who writes poems about suicide too (of course without having any real clue about what life or death means). This song is quite good though...unmistakably written by a young person, but quite sincere, honest and even witty.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

2008-09-12T13:41:00.004-05:00

These days I am catching up with the British New Wave classics of the early 60s. Karel Reisz's 1960 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is considered an important milestone of the same movement. It is no doubt a great achievement but it suffers a little in comparison with Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life which came a few years later, because the setting, the characters, the tone and the basic themes are common to both to a great extent. Anderson's film is much more stylish and also much more unrelentingly bleak and bruising and as a result packs a more powerful punch. In fact Reisz was initially roped in to direct This Sporting Life but he declined saying that it was very similar to what he had already done. He then acted as a producer and finally Anderson directed it.

Albert Finney plays a rebellious young man with a dead-end job at a tool factory whose personal motto of life is "I'm out for a good time - all the rest is propaganda!" and to fulfill the same he sets out on Saturday nights having fun and generally drinking himself sick. "Don't let the bastards grind you down!" he screams at his superiors at work and anybody who questions him or asks him to "settle down." To him settling down would mean accepting a life that his parents and in fact everybody around him has accepted as real - life spent in the kitchen and glued in front of the TV. In his rebellious quest he finds himself getting involved with a married woman (played by Rachel Roberts who was also wonderful in This Sporting Life) and when things get unexpectedly messy he is finally forced to make some tough decisions. The ending of the film is somewhat ambiguous but nowhere as bleak as in This Sporting Life.

Like Billy Liar Arthur is also struggling to keep his humanity intact in the grinding circumstances of the world he lives in. But unlike Billy he takes recourse in rage and anger to assert his individuality and freedom, even when this doesn't really take him anywhere for real. "What ever people say I am, that's what I'm not," he screams looking at the mirror. There is also a lot of anger directed towards the older generation who romanticise the past. "Them was rotten days" as one of the character says in the film after being subjected to some golden-ageism. Albert Finney really shines in the role as do the rest of the cast. The accents are a little tough to get into but once you get into the tone and rhythms of the voice patterns it becomes easier and in fact all those great dialogues I quoted above will make sense only when they are spoken in a proper accent. All in all, it is another forgotten gem from the British New Wave film movement.

John Schlesinger: Billy Liar

2008-09-11T19:30:00.001-05:00

Once in a while one comes across a book or a film which feels as if it was there just for you, as if you owned them, they belonged only to you. John Schlesinger’s 1963 film Billy Liar made me feel like that. Of course I am not the only one who feels this way. I am sure even the strongest, the most decisive and action-oriented of people have experienced moments in their lives in which they felt that life was “difficult” and taken a refuge in inwardness, a private world of dreams, thoughts and fantasies – which feels like the only way to assert one’s freedom, individuality and autonomy in an indifferent outside world bent on crushing you. Billy Liar is considered to be one of the popular classics of British cinema of the 60s and I am only surprised that it took me such a long time to come across it. I have already seen it three times and can see many times more. This is quite simply one of the finest films I have seen in a long time and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Billy Fisher (played by a sensational Tom Courtenay) dreams of becoming a writer but spends all his time daydreaming about an imaginary country Ambrosia where he is by turns a war hero, a Mussolini-style dictator and a president. In his more down-to-earth mental wanderings he imagines gunning down his nagging family and his pesky boss. He also can’t help inventing lies about his family background making it sound melodramatic. When the film starts his lies have already gotten him into some trouble. He finds himself engaged to two girls who both even share the same engagement ring. He has misspent the office money and fudged the accounts. His firm by the way is in the business of selling "funeral furnishings." Most of it is incredibly funny in that special painful way, specially because Schlesinger edits together the fantasy and real sequences so well. In the later half of the film he meets the free-spirited Julie Christie (some sort of proto-hippie) who has also rejected the immediate world she is in but unlike him she is able to “act” on her fantasies of freedom. Towards the end there is a very poignant scene where Billy suddenly becomes serious and asks her if she also finds life to be "difficult." She just smiles, we know that she understands what he is going through. When she offers him a chance to escape to London he realizes how important it is for him and for a second we see him weighing down the two sides of the decision – the security of his private life as opposed to escape into the real with its fears, uncertainties and responsibilities, everything that comes with it. In the end you just pray that she could just hold him tight and not let him leave, but well ,the ending wouldn’t have worked the same way as it does now.

The interplay of fantasies with dreary reality reminded me of the recent film Pan’s Labyrinth though I think this film is much superior and much more complex than that. As I said it is nothing extraordinary to invent a private world in which one can be secure, free and powerful and most of our life as teenagers are indeed built around the same. That’s why superhero fantasies are so powerful and appealing and so universal. Although the basic idea is the same I thought Billy Fisher was a much more complex character than your average teenager fantasizing about being a superhero. Most of the film is actually shot on the outside, real location in the city of Bradford which is in the process of modernization with old buildings being demolished and new ones coming up which are no less dreary than the old ones. In this context the fantasies and lies of Billy rather paradoxically make him a much more “authentic” character because he is rejecting and negating the drab realities of his existence. He has escaped into a higher realm of truth which is beyond the “facts” of his world. This also reminded me of Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities who says that in the modern world the “sense of the possible” can exist only in an inward-looking life – an approach built on the negation of what is merely “real” in a shallow way. In fact the only difference between Billy Fisher and a great artist or a writer is that he can’t get himself to act and start his novel that is inside him. (He gets stuck on what name he should choose before starting the book)

Tom Courtenay as I mentioned above is absolutely sensational in every single scene (and he is in almost every scene of the film). His tone and voice rhythms with which he relates his fantasies on the voice-over give those scenes a sense of poignancy which they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Julie Christie has a shorter role but she is absolutely stunning as well. The sequence in which she walks through the streets swinging her handbag is just pure cinema. Actually this scene is one of the hallmarks of French new wave cinema too – a celebration of freedom and free-spiritedness. Her character is also quite refreshingly forward looking – she openly says that she has had quite a few boyfriends and she is still portrayed as a “good girl.” The outdoor location cinematography is brilliant too in the way it uses those sights and sounds and makes them intrinsic to the story. There is a wonderful twist sequence with a wonderfully silly song (“Twisterella”) which almost made me break into a twist. Other characters are perfectly played as well – in fact I can’t think of any single thing in the film which is any less than pure perfection. I also think that they copied the “plastics” sequence in The Graduate from this film or at least took their inspiration from here. (In one of the sequence Billy’s boss shows him a miniature model of coffin made of Plastic - the future obviously!!)

Actually characters who struggle with their indecisiveness and their inability to seize the day and act are quite common in fiction and films but there aren’t many as painfully real as Billy Liar. This is one of the rare occasions when even after realizing that it was all just a story I kept wondering whatever happened to him after the story ended? What did he end up with and what became of him eventually? The truth is not that hard to find I guess, because I feel he is somewhere close to me, in fact a little too painfully close. Lots of details about the film and specially its sources here. I am already looking for the original novel now.

Madness Melancholy etc.

2008-09-11T19:09:00.002-05:00

There is a nice review-essay on manic-depressive illness by Oliver Sacks in the latest new york review of books. It is actually a review of a memoir written by father about her daughter's bouts with the illness:

"One may call it mania, madness, or psychosis—a chemical imbalance in the brain—but it presents itself as energy of a primordial sort. Greenberg likens it to "being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too." Such unbridled energy can resemble that of creativity or inspiration or genius—this, indeed, is what Sally feels is rushing through her—not an illness, but the apotheosis of health, the release of a deep, previously suppressed self."

Rather disappointingly NYRB these days seems to contain mostly "topical" essays. Feels like a waste to me.

Vincent Minnelli: Brigadoon

2008-09-10T09:57:00.003-05:00

Another charming and criticism-proof musical from Vincent Minnelli. To find faults in this film is to not get the film at the most fundamental level. I thought it was less successful artistically than the two other musicals by Minnelli that I saw recently. The dances aren't as elegantly choreographed and also not as expressive or witty as in The Bandwagon (the "dancing in the dark" sequence or the "girl hunt ballet") and the songs never quite make you feel bursting into singing yourself as the songs in Meet Me in St Louis do (I am still humming "the trolley song" two weeks after I saw it).

Wikipedia tells me that Brigadoon was originally a German fairy tale but apparently so that the post-war audiences wouldn't be offended the guys who wrote the stage musical based on the story changed the setting to Scotland. It made sense because in popular culture at least Scotland has this image of being a very idyllic, rustic place where people speak in strange accents and use very curious sounding words and phrases. Two tourists (played by Gene Kelly and Van Johnson as his wisecracking buddy) from New York City no less, go on a hunting expedition to Scotland and get lost. While wandering through the forest on the highlands they come across the village Brigadoon which is not on the map. As they later learn the village comes to life only once in hundred years and only for one day. Things happen, as they do in fairy tales, very quickly (love at first sight etc). Gene Kelly falls in love with a pretty Scottish lass played by the beautiful Cyd Chariss (who died a few months back). But at the end of the day our hero can't quite make up his mind to live in Brigadoon forever and returns to the dreary New York City with its dull, phony, noisy and materialistic life. But as everybody knows the power of true love can never be underestimated even when it comes to miracles so the film ends on a happy surprise note.

I don't think there can be any argument that the isolationist fantasy presented in the film is deeply reactionary. People in Brigadoon believe in the superiority of their own ways of life and they don't want anything to do with the outside world and they are happy and smug about their isolation. When one of them wants to escape he is condemned not just because it will spell the doom for everyone but because he is not able to see possibility of happiness in Brigadoon's culture and beliefs. The other part of the story - that one has to suspend rational judgments and be willing to believe in miracles doesn't trouble me because it can be interpreted metaphorically and this is exactly what makes great fairy tales so resonant, even "poetic" in their effect, if not in their execution or storytelling. I also loved the New York City sequence. It very succintly and powerfully showed how empty such lives really are (though I would say that for me life in Brigadoon would be a little dreary too).

The songs are quite good here as well though not the same as Meet Me in St Louis. I loved the "Waiting for my dearie" song in which Cyd Charisse sings about how she would rather remain an old maid than get married to someone who is not her true love. One feels like resisting such unbridled display of naivete, romanticism and hope but can't help getting swayed by the overall effect. Two other songs "Go Home with Bonnie Jean" and "Heather on the Hill" are also quite good and later also has some good romantic dancing. The Scotland of course is not the real Scotland but created on the sets. I doubt if the real Scotland looks like the one presented here but that again is missing the point of the film. In most of the scenes the background does retain the illusion of depth which is all that is needed. Parts of it are more like a ride in theme park but like most fairy tales it does have a core of truth beneath all the glitterings of its artificial surface.

Life-affirming literature?

2008-09-09T21:09:00.004-05:00

The concept of "life-affirming literature" seems like a contradiction in terms to me, specially in the world we live in where we are already surrounded by so many phony messages by advertising, homilies of religious gurus, the political propaganda and other such frauds which do the same thing. (Like "Negative things happen to negative people" which I overheard in a conversation today.) What we desperately need instead is a voice of negation and that's what we should look for in art and literature because only in negation we can hope to find truth and freedom. There is a long tradition in philosophy when it comes to pessimism and negation but somehow when we talk of art and literature we (by that I mean the common readers) feel forced to justify and explain - if it is art it must have something positive to say about life.

I was thinking about it and a few other things while watching the recently released Elegy, a very disappointing film based on a moderately interesting book (Philip Roth's The Dying Animal). It was also I think a very personal reaction. More and more I realize that despite being aggressively anti-religious, my views on "the mind-body problem" are actually somewhat theological if not puritanical. I idealise "the life of the mind" which to me feels the same as negating "the life of the body". It is from this perspective that I found the film so depressing (and not in a good enlightening way).

It has actually become almost a cliche in fiction and films - an old man facing death desperate for a last grasp of life reaches out for pleasures of young female flesh - basically the absurd and sordid drama of human condition all over again till the very last moment. And this is even more ironical because the protagonist in the film is a professor of literature - someone who is supposed to be devoted to the life of the mind! Maybe what Roth is doing is a form of negation too - the negation of the idea that the body and the baser aspects of life can be transcended for a higher ideal where one can be genuinely free. I wonder what he thinks of the stages of life as prescribed in Hinduism where old age means "Vanaprastha" (literally, departing to the forests) when one starts to detach oneself from the worldly affairs and prepare for an eventual "sanyas" (complete renunciation). It would be okay with me (even though I do find it very depressing) if Roth thinks that human beings are too weak to leave behind everything and go for Vanaprastha but I doubt it. I think on the other hand he sentimentalizes sex and sees in it something positive and "life-affirming" (at least in principle because all such attempts prove to be futile).

I remember reading Luis Bunuel's autobiography My Last Sigh where he describes his own old age and intimations of his own mortality wonderfully. He says that only in his old age he could feel truly free and truly alive and could see everything clearly. (His last film "Obscure Object of Desire" is, among other things, a hilarious illustration of how sexual desire can blind people to the obvious.) This view of human mortality and old age in general is there in Proust too and that's what makes the last volume of his novel so powerful and moving and puts all the sexual hankerings, jealousies and all sorts of troubles that rest of the volumes document in obsessive detail in context. Personally I am really looking forward to my own old age (even though I already live a life of almost-vanaprastha) and I hope I feel like the narrator in Proust rather than one of those Rothian characters when I get there.

Lindsay Anderson: This Sporting Life

2008-09-08T22:55:00.003-05:00

This Sporting Life was the first film directed by Lindsay Anderson and by any criteria it is certainly an extremely impressive debut. It belongs to the cycle or genre of British films in the early 60s which had angry young man and working class protagonists and which dealt with gritty and realistic subject matter. They are also, rather condescendingly I think, known as "kitchen-sink" films. There are lots of scenes shot inside the house (indeed around kitchen and sink) and it is all very depressing and gloomy as expected but that is only one part of the film.

Richard Harris (who played Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films) plays Frank, an aspiring and ambitious rugby player, who gets a lucky break because of his aggressive and confrontational style of playing. Although financially secure his attempts at transcending his class identity prove unsuccessful. Even more bitterly he is rebuffed by his widowed landlady who refuses to return his attentions mainly because she is still mourning for her dead husband and also because she can perhaps see through his macho-posturing and his violent personality and realise how hopeless their relationship will be in a conservative society like theirs.

The film is quite long and the story (and specially the ending) is utterly and relentlessly bleak but it is also very gripping mainly because the two lead actors are so good. Richard Harris looks and acts like young Marlon Brando - the inarticulate angry young man who can express himself only through aggression and violence. Rachel Roberts who plays the landlady also gives a painfully moving performance. They were both nominated for quite a few awards that year. The film also becomes more interesting because Anderson uses a non-linear style of storytelling with unexpected and random flashbacks. It is confusing initially but once you get into the rhythm the effect becomes very powerful. It is also shot very beautifully in a stark and realistic manner using the landscape to capture the feelings of despair and hopelessness very well. This goes very highly recommended! I am already looking for other kitchen-sink films now.

The Stupidity Crisis

2008-09-08T22:43:00.003-05:00

Arts and Letters Daily points to an article (part 2 here) about the stupidity crisis that is supposed to be plaguing American culture, forcing certain academics to write books with titles like "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future." The culprits are familiar: institutionalized anti-intellectualism, entertainment industry, consumerism, religious fundamentalism, political correctness, postmodernism, course-work centered around grades, google, youtube etc.

Film Criticism and Internet

2008-09-08T13:22:00.003-05:00

I generally stay away from these discussions but this "symposium" about film criticism and internet in Cineaste magazine has lots of eminent (American) film critics and bloggers weighing in on the issue. Nothing new but it is nice to have all sides and all arguments on the same page.

I agree with most of the objections that serious professional critics have with the film criticism found on blogs. I have often observed that I get distracted very easily while reading on the Internet, specially if it is a long form essay. You read a paragraph and then you click something else and you have already lost that thread of thought. Earlier people used to get impatient while reading but in this age of youtube videos even watching a two hour movie (forget something like Berlin Alexanderplatz) feels like asking a little too much. There is also the common complaint about the tone: high on opinion and low on thoughtfulness. But ultimately it all depends on the reader. One can choose what to read and what to focus on and try to hold on to a state of mind for some time without letting oneself be distracted.

On the other hand it is also true that for people who are not in academia or those who don't have access to academic libraries there is often no other alternative to Internet for access to criticism or in fact to secondary literature in any other form. I wish more serious criticism were available online, at least those back issues of journals and reviews.

David Lean at Film Forum

2008-09-07T08:55:00.003-05:00

Film Forum is holding a comphrehensive-looking retrospective of David Lean's films which includes his early obscure works too which I have not seen. I specially want to see his "Madeleine" which sounds really intriguing. The film forum website as always is worth bookmarking.

Also an article by Armond White about the same...

Stifter Review

2008-09-07T08:31:00.003-05:00

Adam Kirsch reviews Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal which has just been published by the NYRB Classics. He has been on my to-read list for quite some time.

"Thomas Mann came closer to the true experience of reading "Rock Crystal" when he praised Stifter as "one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature." In "Rock Crystal," as in a Mann story, plot and description are never "innocent," no matter how lovingly they are elaborated. Rather, as the novella unfolds, succinctly but without hurry, it evolves into a parable of frightening depth. It is no more than 25,000 words, if that, but in this short space Stifter transports the reader to the heart of the world's mystery, before returning him to a comfortable dailiness that henceforth cannot help but feel haunted."

There is also some news about new york sun shutting down its operations because of financial difficulties. That would be a shame because it has probably the best book and in general arts review section of all American newspapers. The new york times book review doesn't even come a close second even though it has more pages and more resources.

Practical Philosophy?

2008-09-04T15:12:00.003-05:00

So now we have articles about philosophy in the "health and well-being" section of the newspapers! Julian Baggini talks about a new series of philosophy books which aim to teach the "art of living". What happened to the good old "Examined Life" I wonder?

He also quotes Alain de Botton whose "The Consolations of Philosophy" (an example of the genre) has to be one of the worst books I have ever read - truly an insult to reason and the history of human thought. Philosophers were aghast at the book and its popular success and rightly so. Here is one review. He has also written a book on Proust called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which is as idiotic and as irritating as the title makes it out to be.

An Extract from Juan Goytisolo's Marks of Identity

2008-09-04T14:21:00.003-05:00

Juan Goytisolo's Marks of Identity is the first in a loose trilogy of novels (the other two being Count Julian and Juan the Landless) that were first published in the early 70s. All three were banned in Spain for a long time mainly because all three are about the negation and rejection of Spanish identity, or at least the official Spanish identity as propagated by the Franco regime. These are also loosely autobiographical. Goytisolo himself spent his childhood in the shadow of the bitterly fought civil war and then the repressive Dictatorship of Franco finally made him leave his country in bitterness. He settled first in France and then in Morocco where he lives even now.

I am still making my way through the book. It is extremely difficult and complex to read but there is also something very compelling about the prose which makes you curious and keeps you going on. The syntactical aspects of the prose (mainly his strange punctuation) are not that hard to get over but it is rather the extensive knowledge of Spanish history and tradition that he assumes that ultimately will deter even the most energetic and adventurous readers who are not Spaniards or who don't have a degree in Hispanic Studies. Still, I think he is one of the most original and important living European writers - certainly much more interesting than his countrymen Javier Marias or Enrique Vila Matas (two Spanish writers whose works are available in English and I have slight familiarity with. Any other names by the way?).

Here is one extract from the opening pages of the book. This is preceded by a long passage which talks about people's reactions to the exiled narrator's visit to his hometown:

That was how they were talking about you when the incident of the documentary became known, in cafes and gatherings, meetings and parties, the self-satisfied men and women with whom a laughable decree of fate had awarded you at birth as fellow countrymen: dim childhood friends, innocuous schoolmates, female relatives with cold and severe looks, virtuous and sad acquaintances, all entrenched in their impregnable class privileges, conspicuous and right-thinking members of an autumnal and doddering world which they had given to you, without asking your permission, with religion, morals and laws made to its measure: a promiscuous and hollow order from which you tried to escape, confident, like so many others, of a regenerating change and catharsis which, because of mysterious imponderables, had not come about and, after long years in exile, there you were again, in the painful and affectionate landscape of your childhood, deprived even of the bitter consolation of alcohol, while the eucalyptus trees in the garden aired their green branches and changeable and flighty clouds floated toward the sun like somber swans, feeling yourself less the prodigal son who humbles his brow before his father than the criminal who furtively returns to the scene of his crime, while the Voices - the congenital evil and frustration of your caste joined in one chorus - treacherously continued their dull singsong whispering in your ear: "you who have been one of us and have broken with us have the right to many things and it is not hard for us to see that you have the right to think that your contry is living a really atrocious existence we are sorry for your error but who has put up any gates in the fields Andalusian farmers are the only one who allow themselves that luxury and that is where those solitary isolated gates come from ones that seem neither to close nor to open outside of that exception which is like poetic license no one is obliging you to pass through the arch go ahead then with your ideas about politics and and other realities of Spain go right ahead too if it pleases you with your annoyances and mortifications concerning the racial qualities of our breed who is stopping you we know what you are a Barcelonan in spite of your Asturian name but Asturian or Barcelonan supposing that Barcelona does not inspire any emotion in you or the land of Asturias raise any warm feeling in your soul turn your back on all of us and look toward the horizons why must you contradict a spontaneous movement of your soul if some feeling carries you along pathways of such indescribable sadness after all you will not be the first Spaniard to stop loving his country but why come back then it would be better for your to stay away and renounce us once and for all think abou tit you still have time our firmness is unmovable and none of your efforts will succeed in undermining it we are made of stone and we will remain stone why do you blindly seek disaster forget about us and we will forget about you your birth was a mistake bear with it"

Lindsay Anderson: If...

2008-09-04T09:32:00.004-05:00

Lindsay Anderson's If... is another very typical work of its time (it was released in 1968), alive with a sense of possibilities and bursting with anti-establishment fervour. For the audiences now, however, it feels ironic if not completely anachronistic. This tale of violent "resistance" by a small bunch of young students against their superiors and their "oppressors" at a British public school will remind more of random shootings in American schools rather than an act of revolution, even in the abstract. There was a flurry of articles a few months back, many of them film related, in American and European media about the youth movements of 1968 on the occasion of its 40th anniversary, most of them feeling nostalgic about the last time when there was any hope for change. The young generation now is probably the most conformist ever so a film like If... can only be appreciated as an artifact from a lost time.

There is also another reason for the change in perspective for contemporary audiences. Even at that time there were voices (even non-traditionalist and non-conservative) which expressed doubts and fears about the nature of youth movements. Albert Camus' essay The Rebel is probably the most representative and famous of these. Camus talked about the ethical issues (and granting that they were indeed "romantic" acts) behind anarchism and statements like "violence and revolution are the only pure acts" or "one man can change the world with a single bullet in the right place." Many of these doubts were later justified when the violent youth movements themselves degenerated into banal terroristic acts. A few months back I saw Fassbinder's The Third Generation which tried to comment on one such organization - the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany - about how their idealism degenerated into something that will find a place in a B-grade Bonnie and Clyde film.

If... is a great film, and totally deserving of the classic status that it has achieved. Malcolm McDowell leads a small gang of boys to rise up in violent "revolution" against the administrators and their seniors at the school who routinely punish the young boys in the name of abstractions like "glory", "tradition", "obedience" etc. The narrative of the film is very loose, we just see episodes from the life of these young boys. There is a beautiful sequence when McDowell and one of his friends escape outside and flirt with a beautiful waitress (who later joins their gang). Another member of his gang is attracted to a pretty blond boy who is his junior and there is a beautiful and quietly erotic scene in which the young boy gazes down from the railing at him when he is practicing gymnastics on the rails. I read somewhere that Anderson was himself a closeted homosexual and I think that explains the homoerotic gaze that is present in the film in quite a few places.

I also found the use of alternate B&W and Colour sequences interesting. On the commentary McDowell says that Anderson initially tried it just as an idea because he was not able to light the interiors of the Chapel as he wanted but then he liked the result and he used it at quite a few other places. As a result of this film gets a strange texture and mood. The B&W scenes have this dreamy quality which add to the atmosphere of the film. The long shots of the school are also very poetic and beautiful. The scenes of violence are also presented in a surrealistic manner which, for those few who had doubts (the film was apparently highly controversial when it came), makes it clear that it is not meant to be seen literally. A good article on the film from The Guardian.

Petulia

2008-09-02T21:10:00.000-05:00

Richard Lester's Petulia feels like a very typical late 60s film. It belongs to the bunch of films of the initial years of what came to be known as the "new hollywood" and which later flourished in the early seventies. These films were inspired by the modernistic European art films, specially the new wave. These films emphasised form and style over content, eschewed simple psychological portraits with straightforward and cliched character motivations. They also rejected the conventional, linear, cause-and-effect narrative in favour of discontiuity both in time and in place, something that more than anything else separated these from the classical hollywood cinema.

Although it appears very confounding and complex at the beginning, Petulia actually tells a rather simple story of a love triangle involving the eponymous character (played by Julie Christie at her stylish best) who is living in an abusive marriage and who starts an affair out of whim with a doctor who is in the process of divorcing his wife. The story is told in a very non-linear way with many flashbacks and flash forwards. It is actually quite confusing at the beginning, because some cuts show the events prior to their meeting and others show the violent events which are yet to come but slowly everything starts to fall into place. The use of flashbacks is quite common in classical narrative cinema but the flashback here is nothing like in Casablanca for example. They are not meant to solve a narrative problem but rather to capture a tone and mood of disorientation and also jolt the viewer into awareness of the formal aspects of the storytelling.

Petulia is also modernistic in one other way. Rather than probing into the psychological depth of the lead characters, it is more interested in capturing the feel of the city of San Francisco, specially the fabled San Francisco of 1968. Everything in the city seems colour coded - buses, road signs, the clothes people wear on the streets, the facades of the buildings. It is all very colourful but it is also very inhuman, artificial and alienating. Even the hospital seems to be colour coded! In fact in one of the scenes when a patient asks why the TV set is not working, she is told that it is just a facade which is there only to make her want the "real" thing. The film also makes it clear in this way that it is this artificiality that is creating the rifts in interpersonal relationships though it doesn't belabour this theme very much. A few scenes actually reminded me of Antonioni, in his subjects and themes if not in his visual style. There are also some trippy montage sequences involving strange visual designs and also a sequence with Grateful Dead again placing the film into a very specific period - that of sixties counterculture.

All the three leads are very good and there is a bravura cameo by the always reliable Joseph Cotten as well, but the film finally belongs to the director and his team of technicians. Julie Christie always looked very stylish but she is even more so in this film. Fashion buffs will have a specially good time watching all those clothes she gets to wear in this film. Nicolas Roeg was the DP of the film and he did an extraordinary job with everything - the colour, texture, lighting, dissolves everything is just perfect and extremely evocative. It also appears that he probably stole his flashback, flashforward, jump cut style that became his trademark in his later films as a director from this film.

An article on the senses of cinema website about the film.

Heinrich von Kleist

2008-09-02T21:00:00.000-05:00

Guardian books blog takes a break from all the booker and prize-mongering and posts an entry on Heinrich von Kleist. My heart sank when I read the stupid subtitle ("He committed suicide at 34, but Heinrich von Kleist was no nihilist.") but the rest of the entry is much better. He also talks about his less famous stories or may it is because his most famous ones - The Marquise of O. and Michael Kohlhaas are both mini-novellas. In any case, he should definitely be much more widely read than he actually is because his is one of the great restless spirits who will be quite at home in our modern world. As the scholars who introduce the penguin classics edition of his collected stories say:

"The world of these stories is an unpredictable one, a world of dislocated causality on which inexplicable forces intrude and in which sanity is poised on the brink of destruction. They are the work of a rationalist tormented by his loss of faith in Reason and desperately searching for certainty, for an order which is not 'gebrechlich'. In Kleist's life this search could only fail; the only imposable order was that of his art, an order of words, the strange pattern of his three or four dramatic masterpieces, the electrifying articulated structures of his narrative prose."

Live from NYPL

2008-09-02T20:00:00.002-05:00

New York Public Library has put together a huge collection of audio and video recordings of the live author events. Besides the one on Primo Levi (as I had mentioned before) I also liked the discussion on Freud which included a lecture by Slavoj Zizek. The one with Lee Siegel talking about internet is also good.

The Marx Family Saga

2008-08-31T19:10:00.004-05:00

I was extremely impressed by Juan Goytisolo's Count Julian when I read it last year even though parts of it went over my head. The Marx Family Saga is written in a similar defiantly experimental style which is designed to test even the most adventurous reader's patience and annoy those who look for conventional narrative and characters in a novel. The narrator of the novel, who is addressed as "you" throughout, is writing a biographical novel about Marx and his wife Jenny but it is actually a hodge-podge of imagined details from Marx's daily family life, anachronisms, random sounding diatribes and hazy connections between Marxist theory and the politics of the modern world - failed states, disaster of communism, the so-called end of history and ideology, triumph of consumer capitalism etc. It is all as anarchic as it can possibly be. Naturally the author-narrator has problems with his publisher (named "Mr. Faulkner") and his hired consultant who is intent on giving him advice about how to write fiction which is to put in lots of "Facts", write psychological profiles, move people's hearts, in short write a Dickensian epic about poverty and struggle. (Dickens and Balzac, or rather their imitators, are summoned for special ridicule throughout the novel.) So that is a parallel thread that runs throughout the novel, other than the anarchic glimpses into Marx's family life.

His manuscript (actually same as what we are reading) is exactly opposite of his publisher's idea of what a novel should be. As he says:

"the text you put before me is a mere succession of sketches, plans, outlines, notes, doodles and drafts
(would he use up the list from the Dictionary of Synonyms sitting on his table in order to ram his point home?)
no organising thread, no plot, the reader loses his way in a sea of contradictory data and ridiculous anachronisms! whenever he comes across a story, you make sure you knock him off course and bring him back to the start, to zero, to nothingness! do you have any objections to what I'm saying? "

or a little later giving him an example from Dickens:

"publisher: the world of David Copperfield, extreme poverty, changes of fortune, strategies for survival! collecting money, scrounging off Engels, legacies from friends and relatives, the inheritance of Carolina von Westphalen and, finally, from Marx's mother! What a merry-go-round of action, goods and chattels! a mixture of real-life dramas and coincidences to delight your readers! if you kept strictly to that you'd even have material for an excellent television adaptation, an international super co-production."

Apart from his publisher he also gets long commentaries from a feminist critic named Ms. Lewin-Strauss who subjects Marx to a critical scrutiny because of how he treated his wife and daughters and the way the narrator himself is oblivious of all the implications of the this aspect of Marx's personal history to his overall political vision. This part is really a delight to read.

A lot of it will make sense only to those who are familiar with details of Marx's life and times because most of it is a parody and "abuse" of those facts. From what I could gather the main idea of the book is that the truth of fiction is in direct opposition to the truth of facts because only in the former we can have individuality and freedom. To Goytisolo writing pseudo-Dickensian epics is a betrayal of writer's vision.

AS the excerpts above might have shown this is an unusual book even in the way it looks. There are strange typographical details, arbitrary paragraph breaks, no full-stops, no speech quotes. His sentences don't begin and they do not end either. Everything is a mess, and deliberate so. Still I missed the way he used colon in Count Julian and more importantly the breathless intensity and bitterness of that book are absent too (Mario Vargas Llosa called that book "a crime of passion") which made it a rather disappointing read. The complete review however gives it an "A+" rating which is their highest. As with Count Julian, reading it is a lot of work, specially for ill-informed readers, which might be one reason why I didn't really enjoy it.

Meet Me in St Louis

2008-08-30T15:36:00.003-05:00

Filling up the gap in my film history education, as I haven't seen even the most famous and classic movie musicals which everyone else seems to have. This 1944 film by Vincent Minnelli looks to me the most typical and generic of not only musicals but also those movies in which everything ends happily ever after just right at the time of Christmas.

As I said in my post on The Bandwagon, criticising these films feels pointless, and worse, almost like kicking a puppy, however irritatingly cute. Meet me in St Louis makes a case for regionalistic identity and the value of family and community ties - though it doesn't really take this theme of big city vs small town life too far. The songs are all wonderful though there aren't as many I would have liked. I specially loved the "The Boy Next Door" and "The Trolley Song". The title tune is also great, something that will keep you humming long after you have seen it.

Unlike in regular musicals most of the songs are not part of the narrative and they don't forward the plot, on the other hand they halt the narrative by making us aware of the inner feelings and mood of the character, which normal dialogues wouldn't have been able to do. Unlike The Bandwagon this is also much more conventional in visual design - there are no graceful camera movements or dissolves or things like that. It is mostly static with characters just standing and singing.

It is not all happy ending however. There is a little girl who is alarmingly obsessed with death, though ultimately her artificial cuteness offsets any dramatic import that those scenes might have had. There is however one scene in which she "kills" her ice statues after realizing that she wouldn't be able to take them with her when she leaves St. Louis which is genuinely powerful. Overall a good wholesome entertainment something I should have seen when I was a kid.

Day of Wrath

2008-08-28T13:33:00.004-05:00

Jim Hoberman in Village Voice on what must be one of the greatest films ever made - Carl Th. Dreyer's Day of Wrath. I was stumped though at a gratuitous reference to Iran. I mean it is not wrong and at worst it is debatable but it still felt out place.

He also talks about Vampyr which has been recently released on DVD by criterion. Something that will interest trivia buffs: Sybille Schmitz who starred in the film was the real-life model and inspiration for Fassbinder's Veronika Voss, a painful film about a painful life.

On Competition and Suicide

2008-08-28T13:10:00.004-05:00

Just out of the blue...

I think Competition is the single most powerful engine of dehumanization in the modern world - this idea that people can be reduced to their skills, and that we can measure the worth of their skills in quantifiable terms and then rank them accordingly feels like an affront to me and yet what can we do if we want to survive, other than to acquiesce to all this Darwinian struggle? Competition drains out all the life and humanity from people.

I was also thinking about Fassbinder's film In a year of thirteen moons for some reason (even though I haven't seen it recently) specially the question whether Suicide is an act of affirmation (saying YES) or an act of negation (saying NO). Fassbinder thinks it is the former and I seem to agree or else if it is a negation of a negation, which is ultimately same as affirmation. Life to me feels like an act of constant resistance - resistance against this impulse to say yes, ultimately futile but that doesn't matter. The Melancholy of Resistance - that's life.

Robert Altman: Tanner '88

2008-08-27T10:17:00.004-05:00

I spent most of last weekend watching the mini-series Tanner '88 and its sequel Tanner on Tanner both directed by Robert Altman and written by "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau. Overall eight hours pretty well spent. I think these two will serve as excellent companion pieces to Altman's classic Nashville - all together they are like a mini-course in American politics, media and culture. Besides being educational, it is also hugely entertaining even for those like myself who are not really keen and attentive followers of nuts and bolts of American politics.

The basic idea of the series was quite revolutionary at that time though it has become very familiar now, in this age of ubiquitous reality TV. They created a fake democratic presidential candidate Jack Tanner, played marvelously by Michael Murphy who also played a similar role in Nashville, complete with a past career etc, gave him a fake campaign management team and sent him on a real (as in really real) campaign trail where he meets and greets real people and real politicians and public figures. The main theme of the series is that there is no (okay, make it very little) reality or authenticity in American democracy or politics. And for this same exact reason, Altman seems to remind us, a reality TV show can capture the essence of the American democratic process because there is very little reality in reality TV either! It is also a fabrication, it is all about image!

What makes it so interesting and engrossing is that the series shows this process by which a normal human being gets transformed into an image created by TV and media. We are introduced to Jack Tanner as a professor with a PhD and his campaign slogan is an obvious joke: "For Real". Soon we see a random sample of people disapproving of the promotional video which prompts his team to do a video critique and do alterations which will be more in line with people's expectations and opinions. Like for example, he can't hold a baby properly (ruining a photo-op) so his staffers bring in a fake baby so that he can train himself. He goes to some self-help pseudo-Yoga institute where he gets to learn how to never get tense and lose his cool by controlling his abdominal muscles and on and on.

Jack Tanner is just one of the huge cast of characters and in typical Altman fashion even the most secondary characters get chances to shine in front of the camera at some point or the other. Other than Tanner we have his chain-smoking hyper-energetic chief campaign manager "T.J. Cavanaugh" played wonderfully by Pamela Reed. Her assistant is a little ditzy, and a bit dim female staff who has many funny moments. His daughter is again a hyper-energetic politically idealistic teenager who is always getting her dad into trouble, like getting him arrested in an anti-apartheid protest. There are usual bunch of journalists all portrayed in typical Altman-esque fashion - in short they are all wonderful. Their polyphonic banter and chaotic tos and fros reveals more about human character that even a well-written monologue won't be able to do. There are lots of scenes in the series which are memorable. One of my favourite is when Tanner's Dad, an army man, raises a toast to his son's wedding (a shotgun wedding to be particular but I won't reveal the details here). Another wonderful scene in which Tanner breaks into a monologue about "the favourite Beatle". Yet another memorable and powerful scene is when he visits Detroit and listens to a rap performance about urban decay and street violence. It is really spine-chilling. Youtube doesn't seem to have the clip.

Of course one needs to know all the names to fully appreciate all the jokes: Mike and Kitty Dukakis, Gary Hart, Gloria Steinem, Phyllis Schlaffy but in an in-joke Studs Terkel says that he supports Jack Tanner because he is the only candidate who knows the name of some obscure labour leader (I have already forgotten the name) indicating that even the American public and people in active politics also don't know all the finer aspects of the politics so may be it is okay to see it from a point of view of ignorance. In another joke, one of the guys on his staff says that he would like to marry Gloria Steinem just by looking at her picture on TV without knowing who she is (a feminist critical of the institution of marriage)!

Tanner on Tanner the sequel which came 16 years later keeps all the good things from the original show and ups the ante on drama and self-reflexivity even higher. His daughter Alex Tanner is now an activist documentary film maker who is planning to make a documentary on his father's presidential run in '88. After a disastrous screening at the "rough cut festival" and getting an advice from Robert Redford himself (for real) she follows her dad to the ongoing democratic convention to record his interviews with his colleagues asking them to reminisce about what the 88 campaign really meant to them. She has an absolutely hilarious three way confrontation with Alex Kerry, daugher of John Kerry and a documentary film maker in real life, and Ronald Reagan Jr which is really just one of many great moments in the film. This is also much more self-reflexive than the original show. Everybody seems to have a video camera. There are documentary film makers who are making documentaries about documentary film makers. There is a student who is following Alex to make a film for his class project etc etc. As Martin Scorsese, in a hilarious cameo, exasperatedly says in the beginning "Everybody is making pictures these days!" Cynthia Nixon in the role of Alex just steals the show as it is much more focused on her character than the original which was much looser. Besides politics Tanner on Tanner works as a satire of documentary film making itself too.

Altman in the interview says that it is the most creative work he has ever done which may or may not be true but it is without doubt a very complex and fascinating piece of work which at the same time is also illuminating and also entertaining and that is really a lot. More details from these articles in Slate and New Yorker

Viennese Miscellany

2008-08-27T09:30:00.003-05:00

Paul has just been back from a trip to Austria and has been blogging about his experiences. His blogs are full of a lot of useful and erudite links, so I thought I will just bookmark it here. For starters : an article on Musil's diaries.

"Robert Musil was a truculent citizen of a vanished empire. Old Austria may have been defunct after 1918 but in Musil's excoriating imagination it lived on with perhaps even more hectic exuberance than it once had lived. This was not due to nostalgia on his part. To those who questioned him, he spoke of his homeland as of a world that had utterly ceased to exist (post-Habsburg Austria not, apparently, deserving mention--though Musil did argue against the Anschluss). One of his admiring interlocutors, the Swiss historian and diplomat Carl J. Burckhardt, who met Musil in Geneva at the beginning of World War Two, quickly realized that he, and other well-wishers like himself, "had no real inkling of the Double Monarchy that Musil carried in his heart." Burckhardt found it "spooky" (unheimlich) to hear Musil converse of Austria, in its "astounding depth and breadth," as "of something dead." In another sense, however, "Old Austria" remained alive only as long as Musil's magnum opus, the gigantic novel The Man without Qualities, remained unfinished.(1) This, in fact, rather than any practical or technical exigency, seems to me the profounder reason as to why Musil could never manage to bring his great work to completion. To conclude the novel was to screw the coffinlid definitively into place on the world it had summoned up. "

Satantango Extract

2008-08-27T08:20:00.004-05:00

I have been eagerly waiting for the English translation of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango. I was surprised (and impressed) to see that Almost Island, an Indian literary webzine, has published an exclusive translated extract from the book. I looked around a little and saw that George Szirtes who has translated Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War, and who is also a poet, is on the editorial board of the magazine. I really hope this comes out soon and may be in this case the book will take less time to read than what it takes to watch the film based on it (7 Hours).

I have been proselytizing for The Melancholy of Resistance ever since I read it a couple of years back. It is really one of the most brilliant and stunning contemporary novels that I have read. It also won the Dispatches from Zembla book of the year award in 2006!

Update: There is also an essay by Italian critic Claudio Magris (pdf link or if you like clicking while reading, here), who has written a lot on Central European literature and culture including on some of my favourite novelists - Musil, Roth, Svevo and others but his essays are not readily available in English. His book Danube, a Central european cultural history cum travel book, has been on my to-read list for a long time. (Link Via Space Bar)

I had earlier linked to an article on Satantango by Tim Wilkinson, who has translated Imre Kertesz, on the Hungarian literature website.

I'm Not There

2008-08-25T21:24:00.002-05:00

It is often said that becoming an artist or a poet is the same as finding a "voice," which is seen as the key to authenticity, to who one is, the true self but what if one keeps reinventing the self? And after all isn't that what being in the world ultimately means? Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, the best and certainly the most interesting American film of last year, poses these and many other questions and makes you think about them too. The only problem, or actually more accurately an impediment, is that Haynes assumes an extensive familiarity with Dylan's work and career (and not so much his personal life) and also wider American cultural history in general. Those who are not steeped in these matters will find themselves baffled by the film, as I certainly was when I saw it last year. The new two-disc special edition DVD comes to rescue with a nice commentary and supplementary materials which to some extent provide the much needed footnotes to the film.

As probably everybody knows this is not a dramatization of Bob Dylan's life. It is more like an advanced level critical essay on his work - part biographical yes, but more a work of cultural criticism. We see many different aspects of the idea of Bob Dylan. We see him as Rimbaud explicating his philosophy of self and language by answering questions in some kind of court room trial. The title of film, though taken directly from one of his songs, also seems to make a reference to the oft-quoted line by Rimbaud - "I is someone else", which in other words means that the moment you conceptualize your self as an abstraction you are already alienated from that idea. By casting Bob Dylan in this light Haynes himself acknowledges the limitations of any straightforwardly "factual" way of approaching him. So in other narratives which run in parallel throughout the film, Haynes tries to capture the various facets of "idea" of Dylan as constructed by his fans and admirers, the idea as an amalgamation of his influences, the idea as a spontaneous outcome of a specific subculture in a specific time and place. He also delves into his personal life but again more interested in a generalized idea. Played by Heath Ledger, it is actually the weakest section of the film for obvious reasons since it feels so far removed from his "work". I was also baffled by the "Billy the Kid" section and I am also not familiar with the Sam Peckinpah film in which Dylan acted so may be that's one reason.

As noted elsewhere also the best part is the one played by Cate Blanchett - the celebrity prophet, the so-called "voice of the generation", hounded by reporters and fans. It is also the most inspired section in visual terms. Haynes pays homage to 8 1/2, which actually enriches it thematically besides making it look absolutely ravishing. Haynes also says that he was making references to Godard's 60s films in the Heath Ledger section but I couldn't really appreciate it. He also says that he cast Charlotte Gainsbourg because she looked like the "kind" of woman which would have interested Dylan - again making it clear that the film is not interested in character but rather an idea or abstraction.

I had a couple of complaints or rather doubts about the film. First, Haynes makes absolutely no reference to Dylan's "real" ethnic roots. I understand the idea here is to show him rejecting any passively imposed identity and create and invent new ones for himself but it would have made more sense to show what he was really escaping from or rejecting. I find it specially intriguing because being a Jew he belonged to an ethnic minority in America. Without this his conversion to christianity and his later "religious" phase (you have to always use quotes talking about this film!) doesn't make a lot of sense. The other complaint is about the songs. With someone as imaginative and intelligent as Haynes at the helm I expected some sharp interpretations of his songs. As it is now, there is only one sequence which comes close to doing it - the sequence where Cate Blanchett sings about the mysterious "Mr. Jones". This is probably the best scene in the film too. (It can be seen here. The original is here.) In one other case however Haynes almost spoils a great song (contains mild nudity).

Overall this is not only a fascinating film but also demanding and very intellectually engaging. For those who are new or unfamiliar with Dylan it will inspire them to take a trip to the library or a bookstore and get a volume of one of those critical cultural and historical studies inspired by his work (I haven't done it yet) and there is no greater proof of the success of the film. This is also I think a major step forward for Haynes in what already looks like a very important body of work in contemporary American cinema. Both Safe and Far From Heaven are major and important masterworks and Velvet Goldmine was great too. I have been looking to get my hand on "Poison" and some of his early experimental medium length films but haven't been able to so far.

The War of the End of the World

2008-08-24T00:04:00.006-05:00

Does anybody know what the image on the cover of this book means in the context of Christian narratives about the end of the world? The wikipedia article on Eschatology doesn't have anything. (I didn't read it fully, I just searched for "dog"). May be it is just a generic picture with dog as devil fighting the angel (of death?) but it does seem much more specific than that or may be it is not related to all this at all. The edition I read from had a different, much more abstract cover with a vulture in the sky and an abstracted and bleak landscape below littered with skulls. Anyway, I was thinking about this book after this discussion about Mario Vargas Llosa and the Latin American novel on Madhuri's blog. This is my personal favourite of his novels and I think it is a must-read for anyone interested in latin american culture, politics and history. At over 600 pages it is also a huge novel but at the same time a complete page-turner too.

A few words about the novel now that I am at it. Some people complain that it is rather simple and straightforward in style and and that Vargas Llosa eschews experimentation which has become one of the hallmarks of the latin american novel (and I am not talking about the awful and rather condescending tag of "magical realism" here). I will be the last person to defend stylistic conservatism but in this case the form of the novel is determined by what Vargas Llosa was aiming to achieve - that is, to represent a real historical event in all its complexity and the multitude of often contradictory voices without privileging one over the other. This is in fact a great example of what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the "polyphonic novel," and it is specially important for Vargas Llosa to follow this idiom because it is such a politically charged subject that it could have easily become a propagandist work if handled in any other way.

The novel fictionalizes a real event from Brazil's modern history - the war of Canudos which took place in the late nineteenth century which was also one of the events which came to define modern Brazilian national identity by providing it with a legitimacy both against the monarchist forces and the provincial power centres. In Vargas Llosa's hands this story also becomes emblematic of violent entrances into modernity that many other third world countries went through too - the rise of the modern nation state and all the violence that it necessarily entailed.

The story that Vargas Llosa tells is extremely complex and cast incredibly huge and in fact I have forgotten lots of details in the last 4-5 years but surprisingly a lot of this book has stayed with me all this time. The main thread of the novel is about the rise to power of the central character (even though he always remains mysterious and in the background) Antonio the Counselor, a priest and a preacher, who thinks that the modern democratic and secularized republic which has overthrown the Christian monarchy is not only a repudiation of Christian teachings but in fact an agent of Satan and the harbinger of the end of the world. His cult is actually one of the many millenialist cults which arose from time to time in medieval Europe too, which also gives Llosa a chance to link this particular event to a larger current of history itself, not just religious but also modern Utopian political beliefs which were similarly propelled by similar messianism. The Counselor attracts a massive following consisting of bunch of colourful characters - bandits, prostitutes, beggars, circus freaks, in general poor, desperate and starving people of the region and also a European anarchist who sees in Counselor's utopian pursuit a reflection of his own ideological thinking. Of course it all ends badly and Vargas Llosa doesn't spare any of the details of the brutal and violent fate that most of these characters meet in the end.

What makes it so successful and powerful is, as I said above, its polyphonic complexity. Llosa was himself going through an ideological transformation at that time after having publicly broken off from the leftist movement but he never lets ideological bias colour his judgement at any place. He presents each of the characters on every side of the political spectrum with their own indirect interior monologues so that the reader himself can judge and think about their actions or else what happens to them. In the end a powerful feeling of despair does remain - the feeling of the essential senselessness and meaninglessness of history, the idea that history is just a sequence of calamities with no purpose at all, other than senseless violence itself. I don't think that this bleak and extremely pessimistic vision of history with its anti-Utopianism is the only valid reading of the novel. Like any complex and authentic work of art this leaves room open for multiple different interpretations. The book is actually dedicated to Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha who wrote the first account of the war based on his first hand experiences called Rebellion in the Backlands. It is considered an important literary work in its own right though it is not as famous in the English speaking world. There is a character of a journalist in the novel which seems to be modeled after him. In a rather plain and transparently metaphorical way Llosa makes him myopic - implying that even though he is able to see the events clearly he still misses the larger philosophical meaning of what happens. This is also a statement by Llosa justifying his own work as a novelist too. There are truths that only a novelist can find, truths that will always escape journalists and historians no matter how diligent, sincere and honest they may be. In short it is a huge novel but every bit worth the time and effort.

The Set-up

2008-08-23T23:27:00.004-05:00

Robert Wise's 1949 bleak and brutal film noir The Set-up is one of the best boxing films ever made. I was actually very surprised to learn that it was actually adapted from a narrative poem! Arts and Letters Daily now points me to a long essay on Joseph Moncure March, the poet and screenwriter who wrote it, which discusses this poem in great detail. It is also available on a very nice DVD with commentary by Martin Scorsese who speaks about its influence on his own work and also its very innovative narrative style - the story is told in (almost) real time. Actually the film is bookended by shots of a clock which actually shows the total time elapsed which is almost the same as the total length of the film itself. This is also one of Robert Ryan's greatest performances which makes you wish he had got more lead roles to play. In my opinion he was way ahead of actors and regular noir-leads like Robert Mitchum, Dana Andrews or Glenn Ford.

Otto Weininger

2008-08-23T23:19:00.003-05:00

There is a very informative profile in Nextbook of the fascinating (and totally nutty) fin de siecle Viennese writer and thinker Otto Weininger, author of the notorious classic of misogyny and anti-semitism Sex and Character. I had mentioned him before here. This in particular cracked me up, he rather reluctantly concedes that women are not "animals or plants"...

It is when Weininger turns fully to the subject of Woman that the book begins its long slide into extremism. He proclaims Woman to be nullity itself: incapable of reason, creativity, or spiritual aspiration; sexually insatiable (“under the spell of the phallus”); psychologically incoherent, desiring nothing more than her own subordination to man—“a hollow vessel covered for a while in makeup and whitewash.” Although in a later chapter Weininger concedes that women are not “animals or plants,” but in fact “human beings,” they qualify for this distinction only in the most rudimentary, basely biological way. In a passage devoted to acknowledging the “meanness and inanity” that may appear in individual men, he nonetheless concludes that “the most superior woman is still infinitely inferior to the most inferior men.”

Link via complete review which has some more links.

Robert Altman: California Split

2008-08-22T11:25:00.003-05:00

As a recent Robert Altman convert I have been trying to see as many of his films as I can. He had an almost incredible run of artistic (if not always commercial) success in the 70s. This 1974 film suffers in comparison a little but that is only because other films like McCabe and Mrs Miller, MASH, Images, Nashville, The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us are all such great masterpieces. I will try to write down about these films soon too when I get time and a chance to re-watch them which I think is necessary because his style is so rich and complex that even the most attentive and active viewer can't grasp and follow everything in just one viewing alone.

First, because of his oft-mentioned soundtrack design which incorporates multiple narrative voices at the same time. Altman doesn't distinguish or privilege one from the other, it is not as if there is something in the background running only for an effect and atmosphere. The viewer has to actively choose and decide what to listen to. Similarly his ever mobile camera preempts traditional audience expectations because we are never sure about who the real protagonist is in any particular scene. One character might be speaking and before he or she even completes the camera moves away from him or her and some other background track comes into focus. He is truly a great experimental film maker but his experimentation never comes across as gimmicky and are never meant to alienate the audience, on the other hand they inspire the audiences to do a lot of hard work of their own.

Coming to California Split the film follows two Gambling addicts Will, a magazine editor played by George Segal, and Charlie, played by Elliott Gould doing the same inspired mumbling-to-self routine which he perfected to sublime heights in The Long Goodbye, as they tour the poker, gambling, racing and betting centers looking for money to win and lose. Charlie is just a layabout who lives with a couple of prostitutes, one of them played by Gwen Welles who was painfully vulnerable in Nashville as a talentless singer who is forced to do a striptease to get a singing break and plays a similar role here. The other actress Ann Prentiss is quite good too though they both have only a few scenes. Will and Charlie strike up a friendship at the beginning because they feel that their companionship brings luck to each other. The film just follows a few parallel narratives in the lives of these four characters the main of which follows Will as he struggles with his financial obligations. He finally decides to make a final and major killing in the small gambling town of Reno and ropes in Charlie to go with him but his success there leaves him with a feeling of crushing emptiness and on that note the film ends.

It is not that hard to notice that Altman wants us to see Gambling as a metaphor for life itself and specially life as defined by all the decisions we make and in that specially the life lived in America. He was himself a compulsive and recovering gambler and though his criticism is never harsh or categorical but it is still very powerful in the end. He sees it as a means of escape from "real life", the life defined by purposeful action and personal responsibility, without which there can be no real meaning to life and no genuine or lasting happiness. I personally know very little about card games (and nothing about Poker) and so I got a bit bored at places but he thankfully never overdoes it in the film, though still giving a fantastically detailed, even documentary-like, tour of this particular subculture in America. In short not as great as Altman's best but quite close... An article on the film here

Senselessness

2008-08-20T17:05:00.003-05:00

Senselessness is the eighth novel by Salvadoran writer Horacio Castllanos Moya but first to be translated into English and having now read it I am hoping that his publisher and translator are already working to bring out his other works in English for it is truly a remarkable and a very original book.

As has been noted in other reviews Moya is a great admirer of Thomas Bernhard and the prose style in the book feels like a conscious homage to him, specially in the way his sentences go on to great lengths and certain phrases are repeated as if in a musical refrain, which in effect manages to capture a state of mind which is breaking apart and going under the weight of its own consciousness. Other than that, Bernhard's peculiar style of narration also achieves this strange intermingling of "voices" and this suits Moya's subject in the book too.

The unnamed narrator of Senselessness, who is living in exile in a neighbouring country, has taken up the burdensome job from the catholic church of proofreading and editing 1,100 pages of confessions, testimonies and evidences of massacres of the native population and other atrocities perpetrated by the army. He soon finds himself falling under the spell of the strange poetics of the horror stories in the first person testimonies in the report: "I am not all complete in the mind" says one and at other place another voice laments, "The houses they were sad because no people were inside them..." He notes these down in his personal notebook and obsesses about the "sonority" and "curious syntactic constructions", comparing them to the poetry of Cesar Vallejo who tried to incorporate indigenous voices into his poetry too. He also decides not to share one of these fragments with his employer and colleague because he thinks (and this underscores what I think is the main theme of the book too) that they "might see me as a deluded literati seeking poetry where there were only brutal denunciations of crimes against humanity ... that he would think that I was a simple stylist who wasn't paying any attention to the content of the report."

This is only half of the novel. The other parallel narrative track follows his growing paranoia as he distrusts both the church and the military, which still employs one of the perpetrators of the atrocities, in fact as a senior officer even. He is also a compulsive drinker and is obsessed with sex. All of this result in some strange humour which is all the more unsettling because it feels so out of place. Still there is one "sex-scene" which is really one of the most comical things I have read in a long time. I still don't exactly know what to make of this part of the novel but the remarkable end does put a perspective to all the paranoiac ravings that preceded it.

Lastly, and this may be a potential spoiler, the book reminded me of Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder (Review from new york times here) which was widely reviewed last year and which talks of a very similar incident in Guatemala. I haven't read the book but it seemed Moya is using the same real life incident as a starting point for this book. Of the few reviews I read of the book, none of them have mentioned it.

In the end, neither the Thomas Bernhard homage nor the real life connection take anything away from it or diminish Moya's achievement in any way. It is one of the most unusual and original books I have read in quite some time. Also, I wish they had kept the original Spanish cover of the book. It wonderfully captures what is inside.

Update: This article talks about the background in detail and also mentions the truth and reconciliation commission in Guatemala which inspired this book.

Also, among other reviews I liked this one in the village voice. Another enthusiastic (and exhortatory) review from Kubla.