Werner Herzog will eat his shoe

It is hard to tell when genius assumes the mantle of madness. In the world of films, the kind is exemplified by the Kubricks and the Herzogs - genius madmen in the wake of whose creative destruction we all cower spellbound. 

Welcome the new (and may we suggest 'the looniest') example - Ilya Khrzhanovsky.

NF has been a fan of Ilya for a couple of years now. His scorchingly original film - 4 - was mindfuckingly brilliant. (For the uninitiated NF sometimes describes the film as Linklater-meets-Tarkovsky-meets-György Pálfi-meets-Lynch. Though this should not let you think he's a linear combination - instead, his vision is as unique as these directors' when they were coming of age.)

Witness the fabulous article in GQ on his latest film that he's been working on since '06 - Dau - based on the life of the genius physicist Lev Landau. It's an account of genius, madness, obsession, pedantry; and a social experiment on such a grand scale that it relegates Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo to small time tinkerers of the human psyche. 

Personally for Nanga Fakir, this is the most anticipated film of all time. All hail Ilya!

It's that time of the year

After ten back to back episodes of The Dewarists you are left with the impression of having seen a very well made, slick series. It was heartening to see so many of NF's favorite musicians featured on one program - from Indian Ocean, Mohit Chauhan (of that legendary Silk Route), Rabbi and Shubha Mudgal to Midival Punditz and the Raghu Dixit Project. Some of the collaborations come off well enough; and that's more than what you can ask for. Personally, Papon (of that fabulous East India Company fame - nods to Somnath) and Swaraatma come off as minor discoveries of sorts, as NF promises himself to pay more attention to their music in the future.

The otherwise topnotch series has some irritating moments in between when the hostess Monica Dogra (of Dhobi Ghat fame) is compelled to add her private commentaries on the nature of music and life in general in the most cliche-ridden voiceovers ever (though truth be told, she's not the only one guilty of this misdemeanor). One comes off of this series strongly suspecting Monica Dogra of being a hack - albeit a very cute one.

Thumbs up overall though!

...

It's that time of the year again when Nanga Fakir visits home. All those brave souls who haven't quite forgotten him and can spare some precious, precious time are enjoined to visit Lucknow any time during the first two weeks of January.

Wittgenstein's mistress

Does modern Mathematics, with its empahsis on the trappings of austere, formalist (read axiomatic) conventions, in defining things on the basis of their operational roles (e.g., a 'line' is that which minimizes distances between points (lines are geodesics on manifolds); an 'open set' is that which is closed under arbitrary unions and finite intersections etc.) carry (consciously or otherwise) a Wittgensteinian baggage in being heavily influenced by his concept "meaning is use"?; or did the Bourbaki just discover the notion independently?

Weekend readings: part 2

It's no secret that Nanga Fakir is an avowed fan of Roberto Bolaño (see his fanboy review of 2666 here) and that he finds his books (in particular 2666 and The Savage Detectives) drop dead beautiful. The latest work of Bolaño to have passed through NF's hands is his collection of non-fiction writing - mostly reviews and literary essays - Between Parantheses.

The literary terrorist doesn't disappoint. (As a brief aside, let's note here that Bolaño was the bête noire of the Mexican lit establishment - a painfully bright poet gone rogue, terrorizing all the others who in his opinion were 'unworthy' of donning the mantle of a poet - in a manner not-so-dissimilar as that in which SatyaVrat (that rogue street-fighting philosopher who made people sit back and become self conscious) would terrorize those around him for not thinking things hard enough and thoroughly enough; for their bourgeois tastes and their intellectual timidity (q.v. his famous interrogation/grilling of that 'academic' philosopher Sundar Sarukkai of NIAS). Bolaño and his guerrilla style literary movement - infrarealistas (visceral realists) - would haunt the Mexican literary establishment by storming poetry reading sessions and hijacking events with their own avant garde poetry recital ceremonies. The writer Carmen Boullosa (who later became a good friend of Bolaño) spoke of her fear of approaching the lectern lest there should be visceral realists lurking around.) His accounts are full of brilliant observations - mostly on the nature of literature and the role of the writer/poet as (anti)hero and his reviews are direct, honest and interspersed with nuggets of deep insights. (His opinions, often very strong, on the current status of literature in the Spanish language and on the current writers' from Latin America's post boom phase were hard to evaluate independently though.)

Bolaño's genius is not just in his writing (which is obscenely pretty) but also in his stories of vagabond writers traveling across deserts and towns and cities; disappearing in the unknown, leaving behind vague memories of mercurial temperaments, to be recalled by lonely friends or old girlfriends during static, stationary, painfully long, never ending afternoons when wallowing in nostalgia is the least boring thing to do. His accounts of obsessive writers compulsively scrawling poems under the spell of an imperative creative burst, soaking in the pleasant smell of a decaying bookstore; his punk do-it-yourself attitude to avant garde literature (which literature, he famously declared “is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears. Especially sweat and tears, although I am sure Bertoni would add semen”); his championing of Mario Santiago - his blood brother on whom the lead character Ulises Lima of The Savage Detectives is based; his wonderful, though fanboyish reviews of the works of Borges, Nicanor Parra, Cortazar, Vila-Matas, Twain, Philip K Dick and Vargas Llosa; and excoriating, biting assaults on those who're not 'real' writers (he reserves the worst for Isabel Allende) makes you want to abandon everything you're supposed to be doing and plunge into the punk underground of literature.

If, however, you've not read him directly, you've not experience what's it like to've read Bolaño. So here's one of the many breathtaking passages from Between Parentheses (you're welcome!):

...A right wing young woman sets up a house with a right wing American, or marries him. The two of them aren't just young, they're good looking and proud. He's a DINA (National Intelligence Directorate) agent, possibly also a CIA agent. She loves literature and loves her man. They rent or buy a big house in the suburbs of Santiago. In the cellars of this house the American interrogates and tortures political prisoners who are later moved on to other detention centers or added to the list of disappeared. She writes and she attends writing workshops. In those days I suppose, there weren't as many workshops as there are today, but there were some. In Santiago people have become accustomed to the curfew. And at nights there aren't many places to go for fun, and the winters are long. So every weekend or every few nights she has a group of writers over to her house. It isn't a set group. The guests vary. Some come only once, others several times. At the house there's always whiskey, good wine, and sometimes the gatherings turn into dinners. One night a guest goes looking for the bathroom and gets lost. It's his first time there and he doesn't know the house. Probably he's a bit tipsy or maybe he's already lost in the alcoholic haze of the weekend. In any case, instead of turning right, he turns left and then he goes down a flight of stairs that he shouldn't have gone down and he opens a door at the end of a long hallway, long like Chile. The room is dark but even so he can make out a bound figure, in pain or possibly drugged. He knows what he's seeing. He closes the door and returns to the party. He isn't drunk anymore. He's terrified, but he doesn't say anything. "Surely the people who attended those post-coup culturally stilted soirées will remember the annoyance of the flickering current that made lamps blink and the music stop, interrupting the dancing. Just as surely, they knew nothing about another parallel dance, in which the jab of the prod tensed the tortured back of the knee in a voltaic arc. They might not have heard the cries over the blare of the disco, which was all the rage back then," says Pedro Lemebel. Whatever the case, the writers leave. But they come back for the next party. She, the hostess, even wins a short story or poetry prize from the only literary journal still in existence back then, a left-wing journal.

And this is how the literature of every country is built.

Weekend readings: part 1

Cormac McCarthy's vision is uncompromisingly bleak, apocalyptic and über ultraviolent. Nanga Fakir finished reading Blood Meridian over the weekend and was struck by the fondness McCarthy has for savage violence, gore and brooding, dark storylines that push the characters to the limits and forces them to come to terms with their animal instincts. Having read The Road a couple of years earlier and having heard mountains of praise heaped upon the writer (Harold Bloom (who Nanga Fakir read somewhere, can read 400 pages an hour!) reckons McCarthy, along with Pynchon, DeLillo and Roth is among the great Big Four American writers now) Nanga Fakir settled on Blood Meridian which, apparently is not only on the Time's list of hundred greatest novels but was also one of David Foster Wallace's favorites and his hushed tone in interviews whenever the book's name came up, compelled NF to pick the tome up. Another reason why the reclusive writer fascinated NF was his unusual style of not hanging out with fellow writers but instead staying in New Mexico's awesome Santa Fe Institute and preferring the company of scientists (for SatyaVrat, with whom NF discussed this idiosyncrasy, just this fact was sufficient to convince him to become an avowed fan of McCarthy from then on).

It's obvious that it's a deep, great book - you don't need an NF review for that. What however, is funny is that just like in The Road, NF had to force himself to read the book - which, given McCarthy's style of writing - terse, pithy, bone dry, compact, without quotation marks, commas or other such punctuations - makes NF's task way harder than usual. Reading McCarthy is like watching a Kurosawa period piece - not a riveting experience at all except for the "a-ha" moment at the end when the depth and vision of the creator overawes you. There were times when frankly, despite the awesome violence and obsession with apocalyptic imagery - a sufficient condition for NF to become a big fan - plodding through the book became work, a task in edification as opposed to fun and enjoyment.

So is Nanga Fakir going to read No Country for Old Men? You bet your ass he will! The "a-ha", somewhat cryptic endings are so worth the plod.

...

On a tangential, somewhat different note, the website Yelping with Cormac imagines Cormac McCarthy on a restaurant reviewing mission. The result is a brilliant, hilarious pastiche of the McCarthy style of writing.  Here's a wonderful example:

Whole Foods Market
Noe Valley - San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Four stars.

The sheriff and the posse were now a block away and riding seven abreast rifles in hand and horses snorting and wildeyed. The outlaw dropped his pistol and stiffwalked into the parking lot of a grocery store. Around him young women in skintight sporting clothes stopped and stared.

The ground shook as the posse rode up on the parking lot entrance but the sheriff stopped his riders with a raised hand and sawed his palamino around sending the animal sidestepping like a showhorse into a newspaper box which fell over with a great cacophony. When the noise subsided the neighborhood and the parking lot were silent. The riders and the outlaw and the women frozen like actors in some gypsy roadshow.

A rider wearing an elaborate mustache and carrying a Winchester onehanded nudged his quarterhorse toward the sheriff. Hell he’s right there sheriff.

I know it. Im lookin at him same as you.

          What are we waitin for then.

We caint touch him now deputy. They got their own way here.

The riders watched as the women left their station wagons and strollers and encircled the outlaw. As if some ancient instinct united them. Silent as wolves and staring intently at the broken man standing there. He saw his mistake and called out to the riders reaching toward them with his one good arm but was struck down with a savage blow from a rolled yoga mat.

Notes for a future film

Omkara meets Stalker, in a near future Lucknow. 

Long, Tarkovskian shots of dung heaps, urban waste, old city architecture, listless faces, the lawlessness in the anarcho-capitalistic Hindi heartland.

A Gulzar voiceover, a mish-mash of B&W and color photography, slo-mo porn and swoop down camerawork, deep focus lenses and a potpourri of khari boli-Awadhi-Bhojpuri dialect that's the lingua franca of the then Balkanized north India.

A Kumar Gandharva soundtrack with bits and pieces of Indian Ocean, My Bloody Valentine and Radiohead.

The atmospherics of Wong kar Wai, the minimalism of Kim ki Duk, the brutality of Park chan Wook, the effortless humor of Vishal Bharadwaj, the savage, savage intelligence of Tarantino.

The poetry of SatyaVrat.

Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapur. Tabu, Nandita Das, Tannishtha Chatterjee. Nanga Fakir in a cameo appearance.

Acid rains and impending calamities; rogue AIs and Turing police; decaying Mayawati statues with Hello Kitty handbags; high tech and low life.

...

The only person in the world who can pull it off is Somnath. 

Notes on recent filmic impressions

There are reviews and there are reviews. Many months ago Nanga Fakir came across a series of masterful one sentence reviews of famous films. Some examples that remain etched in NF's memory are those for The Lord of the Rings ("Midget destroys stolen property") and Lakshya ("Heart-broken boy climbs hill").

Thoroughly inspired and awakened from his own rather staid style of film reviewing, Nanga Fakir decided to use the same snarky, dismissive, one line review style from then on - only problem - his film viewing phase, unbeknownst to him, had sadly come to a full stop; and so the one line reviews never caught on and were never featured on his weblog.

A curious by-product of the end of the era of manic film watching was NF's resurgent interest in contemporary Hindi cinema of the commercial variety. Gone now were the days in which he would swear by the names of obscure, arthouse directors of the Far East (though occasional forays into the circuit were not ruled out: see for instance, his attendance of the 2011 Film Festival in which he saw on the big screen the ass kicking Tokyo Nagaremono by the fabulous Seijun Suzuki); instead, he eased into the role of the casual film goer and put his wannabe critic self to sleep.

So after mandatory viewings of recent Hindi films like Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara ('You won't get to live life twice') (one line review (OLR henceforth): debauched Indian nouveau riche spout new-age, hippie carpe diem slogans); Yeh Saali Zindagi ('This bitch of a life' (?)) (OLR: Sudhir Mishra thinks hurling random expletives at the audience makes him cool - well, it doesn't); That Girl in Yellow Boots (OLR: Nice try, but Anurag Kashyap is no Kim ki Duk); Shaitan ('Satan') (OLR: Pretentious, though very, very slick, especially the remixed Khoya khoya chaand song - slow motion porn at its best); Well Done Abba ('Well Done Dad') (OLR: Well done Shyam Benegal!); No one Killed Jessica (OLR: Rani Mukherji destroys an otherwise good film in a mere twenty last minutes); Road, Movie (OLR: Nice, refreshing, artsy - the Hindi Cinema Paradiso); Shor in the City ('Noise in the City') (OLR: Thoroughly enjoyable - much like the director duo's previous: 99), Nanga Fakir is, on the whole, very pleased overall with the recent upsurge in the quality of indie/semi-indie Hindi films coming out in recent times.

The Far East, though, to be honest, has not lost its allure. Hong Sang Soo, Lee Chang Dong, Sogo Ishii, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Masaki Kobayashi, Johnnie To, Jia Zhangke remain thoroughly unexplored. 

He enjoins friends, readers of the blog and fellow cinephiles to undertake this journey to the East Asian heartlands since he himself probably can't venture forth anymore. He's now stuck in the cow belts of his native Hindi hinterland, cocooned and ensconced in the warm, cozy underglow of a culture, country and language he has an instinctive understanding of. Let's not bemoan his final downfall and consequent relegation to the wastelands of laziness and stasis. Let's remember him fondly for what he used to be. He's done enough already.

Hasn't he?

अथ गुलज़ार उवाच

दुपहरें ऐसी लगती हैं, बिना मोहरों के खाली खाने रखने हैं,

न कोई खेलने वाला है बाज़ी; और न कोई चाल चलता है.

... अथ सुस्ती उवाच:

थक सा गया हूँ,

नींद सी आ रही है.

The insulted and the ignored

Courtesy the NITK Numbskulls' weblog - a fabulous and very funny open letter from a South Indian chick in Delhi to all its male denizens - a region dismissed by Shandy in his unique, regal, offhanded manner as "the city of boors" not so long ago. 

Do read it.

...

The disdainful treatment of the macho, flamboyant, alpha male type in the letter makes Nanga Fakir's heart burn with envy. We poor UP-Biharis didn't even warrant wordy denunciations from those charming, graceful, dusky, snobbish, frighteningly literary, English-speaking South Indian beauty queens; our presence perhaps concealed, relegated to the background - much like the case of Kagerō Usui - that absolute paragon of non-descriptness (caution: Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei reference), our stature reduced to obscure objects of gentle amusement - a stark reminder of the wild, wild North - that ultimate embarrassment zone for the techie, shining India of the South and that ultimate white man's, nay, South Indian's burden.

If only our kind was denounced and derided - I am sure many a Northy UP-Biharis' Neanderthal throats would've choked with emotion. 

Being hated is better than being ignored. No?

Djoker grinds the Grinder

Was it not the greatest match in recent memory?

Sarcasm

Scene: An oldish gentleman and Nanga Fakir in the Math Tower's new elevator.

<*NF eyes the copy of Dune in the hands of the gentleman with an amused expression*>

Old man: ...
NF: Great book.
Old man: Oh is it?
NF: You haven't read it?
Old man: No. My wife's reading it.
NF: <*tries to be clever*> She has good taste.
Old man: Ohh...that remark's so meaningful!
NF: ...<*?*>
Old man: ...given that it comes from a total stranger.
NF: ...
Old man: ...
NF: Are you British?

The host

C: So you're Buddhist?
R: Yeah!
C: Wow!

<*eyes NF*>

C: Are you also one?
NF: <*faintly amused*> No!
C: Uhh...okay!

NF: Why this default assumption that one must be associated with a religion at all? It's almost like being accused of having bad taste - only third rate, lazy, somnambulant minds with no discernment at all can claim to be taken in by such stupid mumbo jumbo.

<*realizes the rant was not called for and that he's been terribly, terribly rude*>

NF: <*a little defensively*> You're not religious, are you?

<*now it's her turn to be faintly amused*>

C: Well...not really.
NF: Ahh...thank God!

...

Hosts shouldn't drink more than guests.

The man the machine redux

The great Ted Chiang wins the 2011 Hugo Award (again!) for best novella - The Lifecycle of Software Objects. (News.)

Here's the link to the novella in full. (Link.)

...

Here is an old NF post in which he gushes over Ted Chiang's 'Stories of your life and others'.

Compliments and complements

The greatest compliment ever - from Bryan Caplan, for Robin Hanson:

When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!'

Then I think about it for years.

...

To quote the eminently quotable Shandy, apparently "...news of happenings in my life have forestalled my own poor pen." (see AK's post about NF's visit). However, here's a complement (and compliment) to AK's account.

Yes, jokes told were retold and they remain as fresh as ever. The two obscurantists NF and AK (sidekick NF and hero StanMan in Subbu's never-attempted masterpiece graphic novel) traded in obscurities - AK rhapsodizing about Ramin Bahrani and Wilbur Sargunaraj and NF returning the favor by paying misty-eyed tributes to SatyaVrat, Shandy, Wittgenstein and David Dhavan. They also prostrated themselves before that master obscurantist - Ra - who swayed to the crescendoes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor back in the time when NF and AK were busy discovering the magical beauty of Backstreet Boys.

The streets of Stanford reverberated with sober laughter as NF poorly attempted to mimic Shandy in his post-'Fortress of Solitude' phase of life. The militant Californian hippie AK and the country-bumpkin-from-rural-hinterlands NF tried contacting SatyaVrat too, but had to settle with the memories he had graciously accorded them.

And so the nostalgic, happy weekend ended and AK and NF, chained to their cubicles and content with their neglegibles, lived happily ever after.

Schadenfreude!

A very funny, longish, brilliant piece by the great Michael Lewis whose wonderful, excellent book The Big Short NF had such a great time reading. Heartily recommended!

Notwithstanding the threat of spoilers, the piece is about Germany's new status as the king of the EU; the heavy, thorny crown the new formed status necessitates Germany wear; the (in)famous Teutonic pedantry and superhuman levels of abidance by rules; the German culture's apparent Victorian hypocricy and fascination with shit (the smelly waste product periodically expelled from the human anus, that is); and of course about the current EU financial crisis and Germany's role in the subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession. All in all, a very Michael Lewis piece.

Do read it!

The perils of Platonism

NF: You're so foolish!
S: You're foolish!
NF: No, you're foolish!
S: You are!
NF: Ha! Who believes in zodiacs?
S: ...
NF: Who believes in horoscopes?
S: ...
NF: Who believes in god? Who believes in voodoo? Who believes in black magic? Who believes everything-happens-for-a-reason?
S: ...
NF: So who's foolish now?
S: <*big sigh*> Who believes in the existence of numbers?

...

The putdown David Hume would've approved of!

Junkie needs fix

It's official now. NF just can't be trusted inside bookstores. Two more acquisitions - Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (from the germ that AK had transplanted in NF's head during his last visit grew a mighty oak tree) and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Who knows what would've happened had Deniz not rescued our poor hero just in the nick of time?

The part about genius

2666 is a ridiculously good book. No, not just good - it's obscenely great actually. Impossibly brilliant, deep, funny, perceptive, brutal and ultimately beautiful. It raises the bar for greatness to more than stratospheric heights. Nanga Fakir might just have read one of the greatest books ever. And he fears he'll become jaded and not appreciate just a regular, next-in-line, your run-of-the-mill great work of literature.

Comparisons with Boris Pasternak and his magnum opus Doctor Zhivago immediately come to mind, although to be fair, 2666 is perhaps, (if it were possible) even more, soul crushingly great than Zhivago. It fuckin' hurts that Nanga Fakir discovered Roberto Bolaño after his death (yet again! Add Bolaño's name to the list of masters discovered just after their deaths (Nirmal Verma and DFW) - in fact, actually because of their deaths and the subsequent howls of bereavement emanating from the literary establishment).

The book is divided into five parts - The part about the critics, The part about Amalfitano, The part about Fate, The part about the crimes and The part about Archimboldi. As was the case in his previous, gorgeous The Savage Detectives, the nine hundred page story is about a reclusive, mysterious master writer; a writer of many obscure cult books whose readership comprises mostly of hyperliterate critics; a writer who's recently become the contender for the Nobel Prize and is hunted by zealous writer-critic followers. And yet this is hardly what the book is about. From the part about the critics, the book jumps to the part about the professor of Philosophy who's worried sick of his daughter's safety and is conducting bizarre philosophical experiments on geometry books by hanging them upside down in his backyard and exposing them to the real, non Euclidean forces of nature and relishing the primal assault on their Platonic, sublime, Euclidean existence. Then comes the part about Fate, where the prenominate reporter from New York comes to write about a boxing match in Santa Teresa on the border of Mexico and the US but gets hooked on to the series of unsolved murders happening in the city.

The part about the crimes is a harrowing 280 page description of the serial killings of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa - a real life incident that makes Jack the Ripper seem like an unmotivated, distracted amateur. Page after page after page we're hounded by the detailed, hardboiled, brutal descriptions of the bodies found in dumps and the shrugs of the policemen as they file away the cases as unsolved. NF cannot find the name of one contemporary writer who could've carried this part off with such aplomb as Bolaño manages to do. In the hands of a lesser writer this could easily turn out to be a sappy, melodramatic and most unforgivingly boring exercise; but Bolaño's fast paced, digressive, dark humored descriptions are nothing short of terrifyingly beautiful - evoking scenes of deep sadness and hair raising cruelty.

The world-trotting, continent strolling, post national story then goes back to where things started from - the part about Archimboldi - his childhood, adolescence, youth and rise as the writer for whom the critics have been looking for. Bolaño uses his blitzy, fast paced, meandering, story-within-a-story-within-a-story format to trace out his lineage, his conscription as a Nazi soldier, his travails on the Soviet front and his departure from society and ascent in the literary firmament. The breathtaking, last forty or so pages neatly tie a couple of loose ends from the previous parts and bring the book to a closure of sorts.

Bolaño deals with extremes - his protagonists will either be overeducated, philosopher-quoting/name-dropping cultural elites or they'll be hapless, clueless Mexican policemen who, for all their jaded weariness with death, crime, destruction and mayhem, cannot help crying over the raped, dead body of a twelve year old girl. Again and again, Bolaño juxtaposes the extremes of the heart stopping beauty of high art with the cruel, Darwinian reality its existence clashes against. Perhaps Archimboldi is not the hero of this unfairly beautiful novel. Perhaps it is the countless dead women of Mexico who remain violated, killed, dumped, and, ultimately, forgotten. Perhaps the real hero is Bolaño himself with his sheer, superhuman power of spinning a great yarn, making it possible for aesthetics to be ugly, for horror to be edifying.

2666 is a majestic work of awe-inspiring beauty and unimaginable depth. It's not genius. It's more than that, more than that.

Much more than that.

!

Time is scarce.
Energy is scarcer.

Pick your battles very carefully.

Bookslut

SatyVrat once told his best friend Nanga Fakir a story about von Neumann (in their S'kal days). According to him, von Neumann died one of the most painful deaths possible. Immediately, this set NF's mind racing to check if the giant had died of starvation or suffocation or some other such horrendous cause; but his thoughts were interrupted by Satyavrat's declaration that von Neumann's death was preceded by a noticeable (according to von Neumann that is) reduction in his powers of thinking which disturbed him no end and he died a miserable death - cursing his slow-wittedness and the emasculation of his superhuman intellect to mere mortal levels.

As all SatyaVrat stories go, the origins and veracity of this story are suspect. (Another one of his von Neumann stories went like this: von Neumann's daughter (who apparently was also some sort of prodigy) once claimed that there was only one person in the whole world who knew more Mathematics than her father - namely she herself. The tragedy was that she was a paranoid schizophrenic. The only true part of this story is that von Neumann had a daughter. She was not a paranoid schizophrenic. Nor was she a mathematician. She is a business school professor at U Mich, alive and a well functioning human female. Her name is Marina and this is her Wikipedia page.) And as all SatyaVrat stories go, the facts of the story somehow don't matter so much because the moral behind them is deep and non trivial - in this particular case the moral being that dying a grisly death is a sufficient but not necessary condition for dying a painful death.

Despite his pretensions to the contrary, Nanga Fakir has always prided himself on being a great reader and, more often than not, on being the most literate (though according to SatyaVrat the least educated), well read person in the room. In '09, he read about 45-50 books (though truth be told, many of them were comic books and therefore, easily readable in a day or two) and in '10 he read about 23-24 books. His reading tastes remained diverse, eclectic and idiosyncratic - ranging from science, technology, mathematics and philosophy to fantasy, science fiction, graphic novels/comics, Indian writing in English and postmodern American literature.

So when during the first six months of 2011, NF managed to read only 3-4 books and confided the distressing new development to Bejin Hakumei (who refused to believe him and expressed her dismay in no uncertain terms); and as NF, to his horror, began empathizing with AK who'd once declared that he just couldn't read anymore, he suddenly remembered the von Neumann story and prepared for the onslaught of the bout of depression that was sure to hit him hard. The fact that he'd been stuck on Gravity's Rainbow for the past many months; and had been plodding through the notoriously hard to read magnum opus (though truth be told, the book's uproariously funny in places) for the past many, many months (three? four? five?) added to his sense of loss.

So he got himself a big truckload of new books - hoping that their sense of newness will kill the ennui induced by the ferociously hard Pynchon tome.

It so worked!

Among new additions to his bookshelf are The Windup Girl, River of Gods, The Pale King (DFW's last unfinished book), Our Band Could be Your Life, The Big Short, Conversations with Economists and Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

To add, he got hold of The Dispossessed and The Best Short Stories of J G Ballard from the Science Fiction Forum. Within two weeks, NF read The Big Short and Our Band could be Your Life; and is three hundred pages into the thousand page 2666.

He's feeling so much better now. If he manages to read up the final three hundred pages of Gravity's Rainbow anytime soon, he'd wind up throwing a party.

In praise of Dubeyji: Monday nights, Spring '11

बेजिन हाकुमेई के लिए !

ओजारुमारू मेरा नाऽऽम,
करूँ मैं बऽड़े - बऽड़े काऽऽम
ज़्यादा नहीं सोचता हूँ मैं
मस्त रहता हूँ सुबह-ओ-शाम

नए, एडवेंचर्स पे मैं जाऊं,
ये ही तो शौक है मेरा, चलो हम साथ में चलें!

ओजारूमाऽऽऽरू!

...

मज़े की बात ये है की जिस बंदी ने ये सिरीज़ बनाई (रिन इनिमारू), उसकी मौत आत्महत्या से हुई! किसी ने ठीक ही कहा है : अति सर्वत्र वर्जयेत (लम्पटगीरी में भी !)

Quicksands of make believe

The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels - a terrific piece on why you'd ever want to finish reading that million page tome. A long time sufferer who's currently held prisoner by Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow - after nearly a year of efforts - on now, off again), NF connected to this clever observation on a rather fundamental level.

Fellow sufferer, understand thy ailment!

Shut the door

I burn a fire to stay cool
I burn myself,
I am the fuel
I never meant... to be cruel

...

Have you ever been cruel?

Homecoming

He will have you believe that if you haven't discovered cinema coming out of South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong in recent years, in particular the extreme cinema movement overseen by the likes of Takashi Miike (Japan), Park Chan Wook and Kim Ki Duk (South Korea), you don't take your cinema seriously. He will also tell you that the story doesn't sort of end there, that extreme cinema is not the entire body of astoundingly original work that's pouring out uncontrollably from these nations, that focusing wrongly on just the works of the few mentioned above will leave you with a blinkered vision of what actual, current Asian cinema has in store for us. He will take the name of the old master Takeshi Kitano (Japan), the (somewhat) new sensations Kim Ji Woon and Bong Joon Ho, Lee Chang Dong and Hong Sang Soo (South Korea) and Fruit Chan (Hong Kong) to convince you that there's much, much more than meets the eye. Lest you think that it's an Asian women fetish masquerading as Asian cinema fetish, he'll swear to you that the characteristics of these great filmmakers (particularly the more extreme ones) and their forays into taboo territories are not all that uniquely Asian and will supply you with the names of Michael Haneke (Germany), Lars von Trier (Denmark) and Harmony Korine (USA) whose works are equally unsettling and subversive.

But don't you pay attention to what Nanga Fakir has to say.

There's nothing, nothing in the world of cinema that warms the cockles of his heart more than a good, just good, not necessarily great, Hindi film. The average state of affairs somewhat saddens him, more so because every now and then he'll come across an Anjana Anjani which will have our titular young hero clench his tiny little fists, grind his teeth to powder and take deep breaths to rein in his violent side. This makes him worship anyone who shows the slightest promise whatsoever (insert names of Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Bannerjee and Vishal Bharadwaj) and elevate them to pedestals no human should have a right to. Then comes the big crash in which the aforementioned deity fails to perform (insert names of Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Bannerjee and (sadly) Vishal Bharadwaj) and NF switches sides in favor of more young, upcoming dark horses (like Amit Dutta, whose FTII thesis film Kramashah, is Om dar Ba dar, done right).

Where have the Basu Chatterjees and Hrishikesh Mukherjees gone? Does it have to be true that there is only the Shyam Benegal way and the Anees Bazmi way with nothing, absolutely nothing in between?

What about Shakti Samanta, Manmohan Desai, Chetan Anand, Raj Khosla? Were they actually any good? How about Raj Kapoor, V Shantaram, Bimal Roy, Kamal Amrohi? Were these good? And what do we mean by good? Should it be a nostalgic eulogy that'll be sung over the graves of these giants of the past or should they be hauled over coals too? Those suffering from Somnath syndrome (named after the notoriously-heard-to-please Somnath who will not deign to see a film if it's not an Emir Kusturica level production at least) show the middle finger to all such filmmakers of the past. Nanga Fakir is not so sure however.

Such thoughts led to our protagonist's return to the world of films (he'd seen almost no films for the past year and a half or so) where for the past few months he's been assiduously collecting films of Shyam Benegal, Raj Kapoor, the old and obscure stuff of Hrishikesh Mukherjee (who still remains NF's all time favorite director - in all languages, across all time periods - not necessarily for the 'art' in his movies (Somnath scoffs silently) but more for his warm, life affirming, taking-the-Buddha-like-middle-path, simple films), Raj Khosla and other commercial Hindi filmmakers of the past.

It's possible that he writes about his impressions as he sees such old Hindi films, not with the eyes of an entranced ten year old (which sadly, he's not anymore) but with those of an old hardened, jaded movie cynic (sigh, sigh, sigh). It's also possible that he won't find them worth commenting upon, or that he'll concede the argument to the Somnath camp and not have the heart to say anything anymore about it.

Anyway, let's start the commotion.

Unforgiven

Saat Khoon Maaf (Seven Murders Forgiven) is a stupid, third rate film that is so bad that you're almost embarrassed for Vishal Bharadwaj. The story is uneven, the plot nonsensical with no motivation for things turning out the way they do. The acting, on the whole, is uniformly bad and hammy. The so called twist ending is so absurd that it's actually supremely comical - a fitting, disastrous end to an egregious film.

So what if Ruskin Bond has a cameo of sorts at the end? So what if the film is peppered with big names all through? So what if the story movements in the film are (with the filmmakers trying too hard to be clever) juxtaposed with interesting little tidbits from contemporary Indian history? So what if it's a Vishal fucking Bharadwaj production?

The only saving grace of the film is Annu Kapoor - absolutely brilliant in his ten minute cameo as the lecherous police officer Keematlaal - head over heels in love with Suzanna (Sunaina). Him and the technical aspects of the movie - excellent cinematography, photography, special effects and shot composition all through.

It's not enough though. What's up with you VB - the genius behind Makdee, Maqbool, The Blue Umbrella and Omkara? Have you gone the way Anurag Kashyap seems to be going - all style and no substance? Will you break my heart too?

Will you?

Miniscule Musings

• Nanga Fakir has joined the ranks of those who consider The Wire to be a masterpiece of unimaginable proportions. As he watched the sixty odd, one hour long episodes over a period of ten days, he was totally taken in by the tight story-arcs, efficient, compact and unwasted movements in direction and screenplay; and the overarching theme of institutionalized dysfunction and disillusionment. As befitting a series focusing on the macro level, societal behavior of public institutions, character development takes a back seat to story progression and to the charting of the course of the lumbering bureaucratic behemoths' trajectories. Yet, there are gems of fascinating character sketches in the form of Omar Little and Bubbles - the Robin Hood stick up man and drug addicted informant - that make the series not just intensely edifying (which it so is) but thoroughly enjoyable as well. As someone coming from a cocooned, obscenely well educated, privileged background, NF cannot comment on the realism of the tales of drug trade, institutional corruption or the Baltimore slang - things for which the series is famous for - but the understated, subtle, very believable and extremely plausible characters and stories that slowly populate the five seasons (with the minor omission of the character Brother Mouzone and the irritating Greek background music whenever The Greek and his team are featured - a very overlookable-on-the-whole, minor annoyance) seem to resonate oddly long after the watching experience is over.
• After the very funny initial forty minutes, Love Exposure degenerates into a very uneven, not-very-well made film that dies a simpering, lame Bollywoodish ending. However there are some things that do save the movie from being a total waste of four hours (yes! four) - the kung-fuish art of tosatsu (up skirt photography - which although done in a very over-the-top and funny manner, should come across to most women as extremely offensive); its savagely funny attack on Christianity that even Richard Dawkins cannot top; and the delectable, absolutely adorable Hikari Mitsushima (pictured here) as Yoko chan. On the whole, a disappointment, however.
  
• In Dogville, Lars von Trier takes the idea of minimalism to a whole different level altogether. Not only does he do away with most conventions of movie making, he also does away with the idea that you need to have sets, props or other such bourgeois artefacts. Instead of houses, we have chalk linings delineating the boundaries of such aforementioned houses with labels "X's house" written on it. Instead of shrubberies, we have vague chalk markings indicating the boundaries of the same. There are no doors, but the actors walk, talk, behave, open, close and enter through them as if they were there. Anything not absolutely essential to the story (a door's just a door, a shrubbery just so - mere ideas in human minds - not essential at all. Apparently.) is erased and left for the viewer's imagination. It's actually more a play than a film. But whatever it is, is beside the point since the end product is wonderfully deep and absolutely brilliant. Bravo Lars! Bravo!
  

Resigned Epicureanism

An excellent, excellent piece in Slate on Woody Allen and his oeuvre. Essential reading for all his die hard fans.

How's this for an incentive? An excerpt.

...Felix (I'll use his surname to avoid confusion) says he's attracted to "emotionally disturbed women," and that's not an exaggeration. The depth of his perverse inclination becomes clear when he approaches a woman looking at a Jackson Pollock drip-painting, and asks what it means to her. She answers: "It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous, lonely, emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos." She's just the kind of woman Felix has been looking for, and he asks her what's she's doing Saturday night. "Committing suicide," she responds. Unfazed, he counters: "What about Friday night?"

Because a picture is worth a thousand words redux

...

Australia. Pakistan. Sri Lanka.

...

Ah revenge! Thy taste is so sweet!

GY!BE - 03/14/11

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (henceforth referred to as GY!BE) start from where Echoes left off. That, however, is not to deny them originality or to comment on some supposed derivativeness or undue Pink Floyd influences. Their long, unending, grandly ambitious instrumental sagas with somewhat minimalistic, vaguely relevant found footage films running on projectors in the background (see picture) to which their music seems to provide a narrative of sorts; resemble Floyd only in the most superficial way.

Almost classical in scope (Shekhar used the word 'meditative'), with none of their songs-with-no-vocals clocking in less than ten minutes, they can seem to be an acquired taste - especially their meandering, experimental, purposeless-on-the-surface initial phase jamming which will then suddenly gel together to form an intricate harmony in which the projectionist's footages of panoramic views from trains/arbitrary industrial landscapes suddenly seem to acquire a meaning of their own.

Although musically the band they might resemble most is Mogwai, it is easy to see that they transcend their predecessors by focusing not just on creating "serious guitar music" but by also incorporating sounds from instruments not generally associated with rock music (the eight person band (?) has members playing violins, cellos, two sets of drum kits and at least three guitars).

When the venue's Terminal 5, a good vantage point is of paramount importance. With the ever-resourceful Shekhar at his side, NF was lucky to have found that and a set of very comfy ass-rests. The mild state of buzz - courtesy the beers - and the background GY!BE footage viewed through the partially filled mug, added to the ambience and sprinkled a dash of good weirdness (in the form of inebriation) to the already very heavily atmospheric music.

And GY!BE? They didn't speak a word. No hi, no bye, no sorry, no thank you.

They arrived, they played, they fucking destroyed!

Goddo supiido yuu! Burakku emparaa !!!

Nanga Fakir (and I am sure fellow Japanophile Bejin Hakumei is with him in this) awaits Japan's coming back to life - the land of gojiras, samurais, anime, manga, seppuku, gomi, harakiri, the insane J-pop culture, kamikaze, Takeshi Kitano, Takeshi Miike, robots, ninjas, cosplay, otakus, hikkikomoris, an army of kawaii gyaru chans, gore films, Boris, Mono and everything that is awesome about our shitty, shitty world right now.

Zetsuboushita! Serious, hardcore zetsuboushita!

...

Nippon Banzai !

बकैती !

Those who've known Nanga Fakir are well aware of his almost obsessive, bordering-on-the-creepy, hero worship of SatyaVrat.

Now the august company of The Hindu joins him. (Link: Join the rationalists online or over chai.)

The link above is The Hindu's profile of that mysterious master belletrist, gonzo-street-fighting-philosopher-on-the-loose, who's vowed to hound the dark forces of ignorance and irrationality, corner them, capture them and then bijli dance them to death.

...

Too bad he doesn't blog more often - despite promises to himself of maintaining a one-post-a-fortnight schedule.

Perhaps this is his way of telling us that he is also human. What a relief! And yet, what a disappointment.

Vignettes

मिस्राजी अपनी धुन के पक्के थे. उनके समूचे व्यक्तित्व से हमेशा एक वीभत्स-सा आत्मविश्वास टपकता रहता था - ठीक उसी प्रकार का, जैसा एक उज्जड, अनपढ़, अल्हड़, बेतकल्लुफ कूपमंडूकता से उत्पन्न हो सकता है.

और फिर मिस्राजी वो काम करते हुए पाए गए जिसकी पूरे गाँव में किसी को उम्मीद न थी...

Debug this bitches!

/* The अटरिया.c program */

#include(stdio.h)

void main()
{

do

{
गुटर गुटर ... [टूँग तादुंदुंग!];
गुटर गुटर ... [टूँग तादुंदुंग!];
गुटर गुटर ... [टूँग तादुंदुंग!];
गुटर गुटर ... ;
} while ('sanity lasts') ;

printf("Bappi Lahiri is the latest avatar of Vishnu\n");

}

From Sweden Pradesh, With Love

The great Jabberwock reviews it here.

The humble Nanga Fakir reposts.

Do yourself a favor and click on the image for a larger size.

Then read carefully.



...

Sounds so fucking awesome!

All About Bombay

(Warning: Very long post.)

Sacred Games is a big, fat, bloated, monster of a book. Subject matters include stuff about Bombay, more stuff about Bombay; and then some more stuff about Bombay.

Indian writing in English has mostly been about grand family sagas (cf. Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy), political allegories (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children), political allegories with a healthy dose of family saga (Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things), deeply felt, sensitive-human-angle pieces (Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance), stuff about Bombay (Rohinton Mistry's ouevre); and of course the ones about ordinary Indian people going about their everyday business written in a language they don't speak (the ordinary Indians that is; the extraordinary ones long ago switched to the master race's preferred mode of communication) (R K Narayan's and Mulk Raj Anand's ouevre). (The savagely funny and biting English, August is the oddball in this sense. All hail Upamanyu Chatterjee!)

It is in this sense that Vikram Chandra's book is so thoroughly, so refreshingly brilliant.

Lest the irreverent tone of the last paragraph suggest that Nanga Fakir has a low opinion of the aforementioned books and its authors, be assured that he totally hearts most of these works and these books form the backbone of the heavy reading NF did in his initial phases of addiction. But he now thinks them more like the mildly addictive semi-gateway drugs that marked the beginning of his lifelong addiction to reading - hence the smug, self satisfied, dismissive tone.



Sacred Games is more crime fiction with literary ambitions. It's about gangwars in Bombay, the business of being criminals (bhaigiri), the police in their roles more as anti-criminals - criminals fighting on the good side - as disorganized as their counterparts, as skilled as their counterparts, as poor as their counterparts, as ordinary as their counterparts; as extraordinary as their counterparts. It's also the only (yes!) book NF has ever read that has people from RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) among its characters. The near absence of any mention of this shadowy Indian organization in contemporary discourse of any kind leads NF to suspect that they must be awfully good at their jobs. (But time and again, experts aver that it's the most lame and incompetent of intelligence agencies in the world and NF has on more than one occasion, detected a secret jealousy in such experts' pieces when they (unfavorably) compare RAW to the (mighty) Pakistani ISI.)¹

It also features 'insets' - a look into the past of the more minor characters - and uses these as an excuse to write about the partition, the Naxalite movement and espionage - both national and international. In particular, towards the end of the book (the final 150 pages or so) these insets tie all the not-so-tight ends together and give a supremely satisfying, complete reading experience. The great thing about the book is that the sheer, awesome power of storytelling wins the jaded reader over - no literary gimmicks needed at all!



And yes, how can one forget the use of language in the book! For long now, Indian writing in English has resorted to chutneyfication - peppering their otherwise impeccably crafted sentences with Hindi (mostly) words, thereby giving the impression of telling stories about foreign, exotic locales (nod to Salman Rushdie who championed this trend taking cues from (perhaps) R K Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand). Vikram Chandra does so with a vengeance! And one is tempted to conclude that this is done with a very specific agenda in mind - the very same 'take that' agenda that led Anurag Kashyap to make Dev D as a riposte to the soppy, melodramatic Devdas of Sanjay Leela; and Govind Nihalani to make Ardha Satya - a dark, brutal reply to the gritty, but ultimately very commercial Amitabh Bachchan launcher Zanjeer.

Criminals are referred to as apradhis, Bollywood songs are quoted at length without any attempt to explain their meaning/context in which they are relevant, people burn agarbattis (incense sticks), meet up in akhadas (Indian gymns), feel jealous over the presence of arabpatis (billionaires) in their midsts, stay away from badmash people (bad people). Ass, cunt, dick, sex etc. are unapologetically referred to by their Hindi appellations. And although generally NF is somewhat of a purist when it comes to language, he was totally won over by the savage agenda, raunchy jokes and the brilliant effect such language managed to produce. In fact, such was the frequency and pivotal-ness of this conscious use of Indian languages in the book that Nanga Fakir wonders if the others will not feel totally turned off/miss critical points while wading through the sea of prose. (A glossary of all Hindi/Marathi/other words used in the book is on the writer's website and runs over twenty pages!)

And to those snobbish lit-crit theory gurus who believe that great novels cannot emerge from the dirty hovels of crime fiction - take that and shove it up your gaand (ass)!

Vikram Chandra has made a lifelong fan out of Nanga Fakir. And you'd be one too if you give him a try.

BACK TO POST

1.

The following is a somewhat obscure joke NF came across many years ago and cannot resist throwing in at the first mention of ISI. As far as he remembers, it was first stated by a Pakistani journalist in one of the English dailies in Pakistan.

In the joke, the journalist goes on to aver that real intelligence agencies are almost invisible to all people - even to the public of their own countries. He then cites RAW and Mossad as the prime examples of such efficient organizations. Building on this theme, he suggests that the popular and very well known intelligence organizations, thus, are either very incompetent or merely decoys. Then comes the punchline - since ISI is so well known, it can't be a real intelligence agency at all. It must be a front put up by the Pakistani government. The real intelligence agency must be well hidden from all political discourse - even from the general public. Hence, he concludes with impeccable logic and a sudden, sharp force of clarity, that the real Pakistani intelligence agency must the Pakistani Agriculture Ministry!

The Take That Series Continues

On the rock scene in the Northeast; Shillong and on Bob Dylan jayanti - essential reading. (Link.)

All hail the Northeast - that last bastion of genuine yo-ness in our increasingly phony world of hipsters.

Take that you wannabe Bangies! Take that!

For Bejin Hakumei

Books read in the past year (Jan '10 - Jan '11):

1) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
2) Kyaap - Manohar Shyam Joshi
3) Neuromancer - William Gibson (reread)
4) The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris
5) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M Pirsig (reread)
6) The Story of Philosophy - Will Durant
7) The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
8) Logicomix - Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou
9) Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace
10) Love Creeps - Amanda Fillipachi
11) Girl With Curious Hair - David Foster Wallace
12) The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
13) The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
14) Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace (reread)
15) Anathem - Neal Stephenson
16) Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
17) Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
18) The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño
19) Freedom - Jonathan Franzen
20) White Noise - Don DeLillo
21) Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
22) The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reread)
23) Maximum City - Suketu Mehta

Currently on the playlist:

1) Sacred Games - Vikram Chandra
2) The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Advertisement

A wonderful review of Kuru Kuru Swaaha - probably the greatest literary work NF has ever read. Consider it an exhortation to read this unfairly, impossibly, obscenely brilliant book.

Take that redux

Lucknow has become obscenely beautiful. So much so that it hurts the eyes. So much so that it's a blot on the consistently impeccable third world, poorest-nation-in-the-world credentials of India.

Just plain unfair!

Take that you Dilliwallahs! Take that!