This stuff totally makes you teary eyed!

<*sounds of muffled cries of gratitude*>

Found Footage - Part One

After having lived a rich and fulfilling life, Andy Umbrage took his own life last night. As a cross platform, multi faceted artist (he was a celebrated painter, poet, filmmaker, musician, art theorist, performance artist and socialite), his suicide comes across as a major shock to his not-so-many-in-terms-of-sheer-numbers but small-but-rabidly-devoted-and-deeply-influential trendsetting powerful artist and patron fans across the world. Expect festchrifts and tributes in plenty and obscure and often very subtle homages in the form of jump cuts interspersed with sickening footages of tigers eating humans in graphic detail and a brown, long haired boy pleasuring himself in the shower - a sly wink to Umbrage's now notoriously famous film "The Revenge of Mowgli" - by arthouse filmmakers across the globe.

Umbrage is not survived by his wife and children. They died seven years ago while protesting against tree felling in the jungles of Amazon. They had bound themselves to immense redwood trees with metal chains and although this was sufficient to deter the tree fellers, it certainly wasn't enough for the creatures of the night who were seduced by this grand gesture on the part of the Umbrage family and secretly paid them a visit to thank them for this magnanimity. The following day, Mrs. Umbrage's face was found chewed off and the body of Master Umbrage was nowhere to be found, metal chains notwithstanding. As this news traveled, a visibly perturbed Andy Umbrage declared this the Ultimate Performance Art of the century.

When the police arrived to the scene of the suicide this morning in Mr. Umbrage's house, they found the tiling on the floor destroyed and dirt all over the house. They also found a shovel near the deceased Mr. Umbrage's corpse. A copy of the novel The Tunnel by William H. Gass was also found. Umbrage had dug out a pit and had committed suicide by putting his head inside it and had covered the space with dirt. Presumably the cause of death was due to asphyxiation. As rigor mortis had set in, the police found the head and neck stuck into the ground and the torso and legs stiff and erect and pointing towards the ceiling. In the outstretched, clenched hands of the deceased, the police found a suicide note with only a few words etched on it in red ink - "Who's your daddy now?"

Critics are already claiming that the suicide was part of another profound piece of performance art. They are basing their claims on the terse suicide note and interpreting this act as a revolt against the recently-in-vogue tendencies of the neo-bourgeois artists who've been committing suicide painlessly and are claiming that by dying in such a grisly fashion, he reminded everyone that committing suicide ungrislyly is seriously uncool and such people are better off existing which in turn (the existence, that is) can only be either horrible or miserable. His detractors on the other hand simply point out that this was another attempt on his part to one-up his dead wife (with whom he had a long standing rivalry) and by the suicide note, he simply wanted to remind her who her daddy was.

The obituary is brought to halt by noting offhandedly that Andy Umbrage had many gifted disciples and that Shuchikar was once his protégé who'd rebelled against his style. Hearing the sad demise of his teacher, however, he decided to open up some windows into his past and pay a last visit to his dead mentor.

Miscellany

• Those of you with extra, disposable cash are directed to the following link - Science Fiction Anthology - which features a short story by Shuchikar - a close friend of Nanga Fakir and Ghongha Basant.
  
• It is said that the song Professional Widow by the crazy-alien-from-outer-space-visiting-earth-in-the-guise-of-the-absolutely-brilliant-Tori Amos is about Courtney Love (cf. "Don't blow those brains yet/
  We gotta be big boy/We gotta be big"; "Give me peace, love, peace, love/Give me peace/Love/And a hard cock."(See also the 'peace, love (and empathy)' reference in Kurt Cobain's suicide note.)). If it's true, then she's just harsh. Harsh, harsh, harsh.
• Recent acquisitions are Gravity's Rainbow and V. by Pynchon. NF also dithered for a real long time over the question of To-Acquire-or-not-to-Acquire Cryptonomicon by the great Neal Stephenson. He eventually decided to not acquire the voluminous (1100 pages to be precise) tome deferring the acquisition to some perhaps more opportune time. Meanwhile, back on the bookshelf, the pile of unread books keeps climbing higher.
  
• The absolutely too-crazy-to-be-real match's venue should be shifted from the Wimbledon to the Lord's. They play test matches there, don't they?
  

Recursion

The Droste Effect in Escher's Print Gallery. Very sexy!




...

A brief technical article, explaining the Droste Effect and techniques used in making the video can be found here. To follow the article, a working knowledge of Complex Analysis is recommended (but not required).

DFW is not a Quickie

Oblivion is quintessentially DFWish - longish stories that meander and digress and ruminate and dwell on details in a way that is typical of the fiction of DFW. Compared to his previous short story book - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which has been made into a not-so-bad film by John Krasinski), the stories are longer; and the humor - much more subtle and dark. Apart from Incarnations of Burned Children (click on link to read the story - one of the most killer, heart rending, brilliant, absolutely unendurable-in-what-it-describes pieces of short fiction with an unforgettable, devastating-yet-uplifting last line¹), which is only two and a half page long, the others are somewhat lengthy and take their own sweet time to build up and have a nasty tendency to hang around somewhat languorously in your head a long time after you're done reading. Don't expect twist endings, clever plotting or character building; the stories have an amorphous, hard-to-point-but-easy-to-experience quality that compels you to revisit the book again and again and the experience is augmented after each such iteration.

The best stories in this volume are clearly the aforementioned Incarnations..., Good Old Neon, Another Pioneer and The Soul is not a Smithy.

If there were ever a quintessential, representative, archetypal work that summarizes, condenses, distills and weaves into one all the multifarious, hidden, interconnected-yet-divergent themes that any writer (or for that matter, a director or musician etc.) might address in her entire oeuvre - if there were a single piece of work that characterizes completely, a creative mind and typifies her Weltanschauung - then Good Old Neon is definitely DFW's representative work.² It opens with:

My whole life I've been a fraud...

...

...all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people.

The narrator is a hyper-self-aware, obscenely well educated and an intensely self critical, successful, modern yuppie. His bouts of self criticism and perception of his own shallowness and remarkable ease with which he can manipulate people's opinion of him drives him to despair and eventually to suicide. The prose stretches the limits of self consciousness and relentlessly probes the very limits of communication amongst humans.

...what goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant...

The story Another Pioneer is:

derived from an acquaintance of a close friend who said that he had himself overheard this exemplum aboard a high-altitude commercial flight

The aforementioned story turns out to be a quasi-mythological tale of a wonderboy in a prehistoric society who seems to have answers to all possible questions, albeit in a literal, somewhat robotic manner - so much so that he becomes the chief counselor of the village and a clique of wise people emerges who charge the villagers to frame their questions and anxieties in precisely the correct form so that the response of the wonderboy is meaningful. (The garbage-in-garbage-out paradigm of programming and the way the wise-people-of-the-village construct is mapped on to the modern day programmers of computing behemoths is unmistakable.) However, jealous of the village's subsequent prosperity, the neighboring village's wise man 'bugs' the system and the boy transcends his previous (autistic) savantness and becomes wiser - but in a somewhat grotesque way.

In The Soul is not a Smithy the narrator recounts a violent episode from his childhood, in which he and three classmates were allegedly held hostage by a deranged substitute teacher. However, he never quite gets to it, as he's preoccupied with the story that he was imagining at the time, visualizing it in the panes of the schoolroom window - a story of a blind girl and her lost dog, which becomes increasingly bizarre as the real world situation around him becomes life threatening.

...

Believe it or not, but Nanga Fakir has begun reading Infinite Jest again.

<*must... not... give in to... temptation. must... resist*>

...

BACK TO POST

1. Although decontextualized, it should still hit you hard enough to sit back and take notice. It ends with the child...

having learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

BACK TO POST

2. Like Annie Hall is Woody Allen's, Eraserhead is David Lynch's, Slackers is Richard Linklater's, Adaptation is Charlie Kauffman's, Godaan is Premchand's, Laal Teen ki Chchat (Red Tin Roof) is Nirmal Verma's, Neuromancer is William Gibson's...

High and Hippied

D : So what does your name mean?
NF : Huh...what does yours mean?
D : Uhh...it means an Ocean.
NF : Yours?
B : Peace.
NF : And yours?
A : Halo...as in around the sun.
NF : His I know - Wise Hero. Right?
S : <*Nods*>
D : So...what does yours mean? Or is it like one of those American names like Todd that probably means your parents thought your were a toad when born?
NF : <*Smiles*> Well, let me think and give you a precise answer.

<*Thinks*>

NF : It means 'Novel Bliss'. 'Novel' as in novelty and not a novel.
D : Novel Bliss.
B : Novel Bliss.
A : Novel Bliss.
D : Ha! Just like being on drugs. Right?

...

#7 : The fuck!

<*reads*>

"It is mandatory to include at least two women in your team for the intramural volleyball tournament."

This year's tourney is so gay.

Eavesdropping on Ghongha

Ghongha: How's your life-as-soap-opera metaphor holding up?
Girl: <*coyly*> That metaphor's metamorphosed. <*smiles*>
Ghongha: ...
Girl: ... <*sporting a quizzical-something-wrong(?)-type-expression*>
Ghongha: I think I just fell in love with you.

...

Nanga Fakir's planning to capture more incidents from the life of his close friend Ghongha Basant. Shuchikar - Ghongha's closest friend and roommate for four years in college (and the exact opposite of Ghongha in personality (read suave, smart, glib and raconteur par excellence - quite the ladies' man) - promises me to help dig up on Ghongha's stories - past, present and future.

दिन कुछ ऐसे गुज़ारता है कोई

कुछ रोज़ से वक़्त कुछ यूं गुज़ारा जाता है - शाम को उठना, तनिक चहलकदमी उपरांत काम की कोशिश और जबड़ा फैलाए, लार टपकाते, इंतज़ार में बैठे मौत के घंटे से (जो मई के अंत में बजने के मूड में है) चंद लम्हे चुरा कर नागराज और ध्रुव के रोमांचक कारनामों का लुत्फ़ उठाना और उनके भीषण पराक्रम और धमधमात्मक लड़ाइयों का; और महामानव, त्रिमुंड और ड्रैकुला सरीखे मंजे हुए दर-शैतान खलनायकों के चीर हरण और मान मर्दन का ऐसे कुछ लम्पट ब्लॉग पोस्ट्स में बखान करना.
...

ये पोस्ट निम्न कॉमिक्सों के अध्ययन के आधार पर लिखी गयी हैं:
१) परकाले
२) ज़लज़ला
३) ड्रैकुला का अंत
...

'धमधमात्मक' नामक शब्द का कोई अस्तित्व नहीं है. (लेकिन चूंकि सुनने में सॉलिड लगता है इसलिए इसका ऐसा इस्तेमाल किया गया, जैसा इस्तेमाल किया गया.)
...

पांडू/सत्यव्रत का नया हिंदी ब्लॉग ज़रूर देखें - सॉलिड कवितायें. ज़ीरो लम्पटगीरी.

लिंक.

Miniscule Musings

There is a scene in Shutter Island in which the warden (a cameo of sorts played by Ted Levine who is more famous for flashing his dick and skinning his victims as the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs) and DiCaprio ride in a jeep and have a little talk about violence. The jeep is ambling through the woods as Ted Levine leans over and conspiratorially remarks how similar the two of them are - how they're both 'men of violence' and relish this streak in themselves. There is considerable menace in his voice - a hint of vast reserves of physical energy just barely held in control by his better sense, to be unleashed with considerable pleasure at the slightest opportunity that walks around and decides to present itself. The warden is aware of the enjoyment he derives from blood and finds in DiCaprio an accomplice that shares the guilty pleasure in much the same way. There is considerable understated violence and hint of some big, impending disaster in the sinister smile and casual wink directed at DiCaprio - insinuating some deep, profound, primal connection between them - the kind that is prized precisely because it's so rare - the elusive bond that blood brothers, soulmates, mystics et al. claim to share.

DiCaprio is horrified at the thought and yet by the end of the scene indicates his willingness to flex his muscles and not back down from the fight if the warden were foolish enough to initiate one. "Attaboy", the warden's response seems to say. DiCaprio gets out of the jeep and walks away. It could've easily been the best scene of the film.

The theme of not backing down and never running away from a physical fight is a somewhat recurring theme throughout the movie ("You've never backed down from a fight haven't you?", remarks the German doctor (played by Max von Sydow) when they first meet in Ben Kingsley's mansion) which theme's supposed to reinforce in the audience an appreciation of the gritty, hard, tough, (if-need-be)-more-violent-than-you-can-imagine motherfucker DiCaprio's character's supposed to portray. And herein lies the biggest flaw the film - the miscasting of DiCaprio as the gentle-outside-but-uberviolent-beast-lurking-inside character that his persona just doesn't reflect at all. The entire (tongue-in-cheek one might say) premise of the film - it might just be better to die a good man than stay alive a monster - relies fundamentally on DiCaprio's characterization as the monster.

Make no mistake about it - DiCaprio is a great actor. For those who've been his sworn enemies ever since Titanic came out need to look at his absolutely brilliant role in the film The Basketball Diaries (orders of magnitude better than his more celebrated Oscar nominated role in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?). DiCaprio was, before the superstardom of Titanic, with good reason, an indie sensation. He's himself conceded that perhaps rather than Titanic, he should've acted in the abso-fucking-lutely awesome Boogie Nights by the brilliant Paul Thomas Anderson. In particular, he is able to evoke the hallucination enforced loneliness and intense sense of loss that his character is haunted by throughout the movie; but for all his awesome acting skill, he just can't fit the part of the monster he's so thrashed out to be. Scorsese has made the little, harmless Joe Pesci far more intimidating and monsterish in his previous flicks.

And so, as Ted Levine gives us a chilly yet casual glimpse into his ambient low-level, loosely chained violent side, we groan and curse him for misjudging the intense, smart, yet fundamentally weak DiCaprio as his counterpart.

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

Deniz is right when she says we don't expect this from Scorsese.

Not-so-brief an Interview with not-so-hideous a Man

David Foster Wallace didn't give out interviews generally; and most of the ones he did end up giving were either print or radio. (Two notable exceptions are the interviews he gave to Charlie Rose.) So to see him respond to questions on screen was a rare privilege. (However, such intimate/direct knowledge of people whom you love/idolize in a somewhat blind, larger-than-life way can sometimes be a rather jarring experience. After having joined the abject-fans-of-Nirmal-Verma cult, Nanga Fakir was jolted to hear his voice reading a passage from one of his books. His voice was weak, pathetic and old-womanish - not the rich Gulzarish baritone NF had hoped it would've been.)

So when Nanga Fakir came across the 84 minute youtube interview of the (erstwhile) saddest person on earth, he watched it with a little hesitation. Let's just say that he was not in the least disappointed.

The interview is conducted by a German team and the interviewer is a girl with a thin, squeaky voice (who gives the impression of being blonde, thin, studentsy and a little on the plainer side) and is overawed by the interviewee. The interviewee is a nerdy/geeky looking mental titan, incredibly shy and self conscious and nervous and mindful of his own self consciousness and obvious unease that he exudes in front of the camera. He's also very honest and earnest and is very much uneasy when the interviewer asks him big, grand philosophical questions (Cf. first question: "Do you think humor comes out of something sad or is it a cliché?"). DFW's is aghast that such questions are being put to him. He twitches, bares his fangs and grits his teeth. Intense surprise contorts his face and yet, to his credit, he decides to answer such questions in all seriousness⁰.

To see for yourself, here's the screenshot of the guy when this question's put to him:

The screenshot above is funny. DFW's face gives the impression of a deflated balloon. And yet, time and again, as these questions are put to him, and as he gets ready to answer them honestly and in detail, a spasm of painful contortion zaps his face. He repeatedly asks, full of self doubt and misgiving after each such answer: "Does that make any sense to you?", "You're not going to use that for the interview are you?", "I doubt if it makes much sense." and "I can hear in my head a voice making fun of this stuff.". It is clear that the problem of meaningful communication among humans comes to the fore here - something that David Foster Wallace has written about numerous times. He refers to it in the interview also when talking about the purpose of good art and how it helps one consciousness transcend its being trapped in a body and reach and enter another, howsoever fleetingly. Hence his response "Since it can't be talked about directly, we need to make up stories about it."

However, the best thing about the interview (apart from the fact that it is one of the really rare pictures/video of the man without a bandanna and long hair) is that it is uncut. So you can see the microphones being set and the off camera crew passing off-hand comments on DFW's on-screen persona (in one such encounter an off camera voice jibes - "You're pontificating" to which DFW rolls his eyes over and says "Yeah, yeah") and the clear discomfort of David Foster Wallace at being treated like an important "writer".

Here's the first part (of ten) of the interview on youtube.



One wishes the son of a bitch hadn't killed himself!

...

0.

BACK TO POST

DFW's (eventual) response to this question:

"I know that Wittgenstein believed that the most serious and profound problems and questions can be discussed only in the form of jokes.", and

"There are forms of humor that offer escape from pain and there are forms of humor that...transfigure pain. Does that make any sense?"

आगंतुक

Nanga Fakir will visit Lucknow from 26th December to 26th January. He enjoins all those who can, to take time some time out and pay him a visit.

लिटगीरी रीडक्स

Lit links:

1. The Use of Poetry : An excerpt from the latest Ian McEwan novel about a fictional Nobel Prize winning physicist Michael Beard. Read this to experience first-hand, the sheer breathtaking awesomeness that McEwan's prose is. From one of the foremost writers of our times. Totally killer!
2. Midnight in Dostoyevsky : Don DeLillo is currently the reigning lit grandmaster of American literature. This somewhat longish, eight page story set in the blistery upstate New York winter about two lonely, intensely competitve students, a mysterious old man and a logic professor who reads Dostoyevsky day and night needs to be read. Nay, demands to be read.
3. All That : And yes, our very own David Foster Wallace!

Recommended Setting/Background/Ambient Sound: The epic 19 minute Farm Aid '98 version of Down by The River by Neil Young and Phish.

...

Yes, you are welcome!

Phishing for Words

Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod...

Link 1

Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod...

Link 2

Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod...



OOOOOOOOOOhmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod...

Link

Link to the story 'Stalker' that NF penned a few months ago.

(Warning: Is long and unfunny and sometimes takes itself too seriously. Story content is softcore-pornish. )

Recent Musical Adventures

Buddy Guy and BB King (August 29th '09): The King has gotten old. His teeth are falling, he's going senile and probably has attacks of debilitatingly intense incontinence. The seventy-or-something-minute performance on the slowly rotating stage was half hearted at best. It included lots of boring conversational pieces about music, beauty and love to the accompaniment of a staid rhythm that could have been generated by drowsy amateur musicians on autopilot mode. The angry outbursts ("Shut the fuck up and sing you old man") from a row or two behind confirmed NF's suspicion that this sentiment was shared by many.

Verdict: The thrill is gone. Totally.

Contrast this, however, with the positively brilliant Buddy Guy performance who (technically) "opened" for the grand old man. His remarkable wit, sharp humor, awe-inspiring stage presence⁰ and excellent song selection confirm his stature as the best Blues musician alive today. So much charisma in a seventy three year old in a loose shirt and polka dotted guitar is unfair - obscenely so.

Porcupine Tree (Sep 24th '09): Nanga Fakir had been taken in by the awesomeness of the band when he was in 3rd year in S'kal and PP had come one arbit day to announce his latest favorite rock fetish. "Arriving Somewhere..." had been a bolt from the blue from which Nanga Fakir, in some sense, never completely recovered¹.

The concert was at Terminal 5. Despite a couple of setbacks², Nanga Fakir managed to enjoy the show which comprised mostly of songs from the new album - a decidedly heavier sounding record, it's melody notwithstanding. Right now, NF opines that Porcupine Tree are one of the very few bands at the extreme frontier of heavy-metal-fused-with-progressive-tendencies that are able to maintain a semblance of melody in the presence of heavy and harsh sounding guitar work. Much of that credit must go to the frontman Steve Wilson's mellow and somewhat dreamy, mellifluous voice.

An out and out excellent concert but for the presence of the random bastard who kept shouting Free Bird after the end of each piece.

Indian Ocean (October 09th '09): At Times Square's B.B. King's Blues Club & Grill. Credit goes to Somnath Pal for bringing the concert to NF's notice which he attended with a friend from the nearby Rutgers University (which by the way, is supposedly one of the most boring places on earth). The great John Turturro, apparently a big Indian Ocean fan was in attendance somewhere in the dark hall.

As is usual with their concerts, Indian Ocean impressed with their improvised jams, their new songs (yes! finally) and their rather bawdy, in-your-face and rustic brand of humor³. The funniest thing was the presence of white chicks in search for an exotic Indian sounding band that they could put up as their latest new authentic musical discovery on Facebook. Nanga Fakir had a hard time controlling his laughter as they swayed/swung their heavy round asses to the sounds of Hille Re.

Among other, relatively minor adventures are the Friday night Jazz Jam sessions in the University Cafe and the Mongolian throat singing concert that The Horse (who's name has now been changed to 'Sama') took NF to.

The final stage of this series of adventures includes NF's killing blow - his upcoming appearance at Phish's reunion concert on 2nd December in Madison Square Garden!

The most breathtaking, the most versatile and definitely the best band of the '90s - Phish had blown NF away when he was in the seventh block in his 3rd year in S'kal. He had recently discovered the Grateful Dead and had overheard some conversation in which Phish were compared to the Dead. An immediate download of songs followed by an instant conversion to their cult had happened. Now with the benefit of hindsight, NF can definitely assert that although Phish must have started out as a major Grateful Dead inspired group, not only did they find their own voice totally distinct from The Dead, but in fact, they beat Dead at their own game - long improvisational jams that seem to continue forever (especially if you were high on grass).

Their break-up in 2004 had brought on an existential crisis for a lot of their phans⁴ including Nanga Fakir who gave up hoping to ever see them together. But the fat lady sang, and sang far better than Susan Boyle. And how Grateful are their Dead Phans to see them back!

BACK TO POST

0. Actually "stage presence" is technically a misnomer since he jumped around so much - frequently running up the rows, coming back down, going off again - all while doing his guitaring calisthenics Hendrix ultimately got so famous for.

BACK TO POST

1. Porcupine Tree is the last great rock band NF got hooked on to (along with Radiohead). After that, his musical education came to a standstill. Despite entreaties by juniors and fellow music geeks to follow Opeth, Tool or Death Cab for Cutie, NF has felt too sapped and enervated to follow any band in earnest ever since.

BACK TO POST

2. A couple of friends NF went with were thrown out of the venue for drunken/disorderly behavior; how NF survived is another story altogether. He claims his impeccable behavior and extraordinary tact and cool saved his ass. But we know enough to not believe him when he talks about himself, don't we?

BACK TO POST

3. Quote-Unquote: (Translated from the street-level Hindi they usually speak)

"Next year we'll play at Carnegie Hall. But we probably won't see you there (since you won't be invited?). (Nudge-nudge-wink-wink.) <*Oohs and aahs from the audience*>. But for you, we'll be back next September at this same place. How about that?"

BACK TO POST

4. The comparisons with the Grateful Dead are long and well reasoned. Just like the Dead, Phish had a huge community of fans who would follow them around on tours and these dedicated, hardcore followers, had a special name (the Deadheads in the case of Grateful Dead) - Phans.

Yay!

Nanga Fakir's science fiction story "Stalker" wins the first prize in the Scientific Indian's Science Fiction story writing contest.

Link.

Thanks to Mons_thaa, Garnet, Ranaji, Tejo, Ra, Agent, Man and Somnath Pal.

Fuck the Police!

(Click for a bigger size)
(Courtesy: Vatsa)



PS: Probably photoshopped.

Life Under the New Regime - 3

Nanga Fakir has probably run out of clever, meaningful, witty, smart, funny or even interesting things to say. So he planned to put out a last, final, somewhat maudlin, self indulgent, morosey post announcing the quiet demise of this space. Procrastination intervened however. And a little later, NF decided to not take himself seriously after all.

The adventures of the book junkie continue well - even in the face of deadlines, crises of all shapes and sizes and just plain old routine work. For keeping up with this rather unfriendly and reclusion-inducing habit, (which most of his old friends who shared the same passion for reading in their younger, halcyon years at S'kal (AK, Pandu, Ra, Subbu...) or perhaps even earlier at school (Somnath, Man...) have rather readily shed) Nanga Fakir would like to formally pat himself on the back.

<*pat, pat, pat*>

Reading continues to be a source of delight. NF's eyes have got keener, more discerning. His playlists continue to grow in quantity and quality, in the girth of the volumes and the width of the subject matter, in fiction and in non-fiction, in style and in substance. Technical details at the sentence and the word level, the idiosyncrasies of form and content, the art's heart's purpose - speak to NF in low, hushed voices, laying bare the mechanics of communication, fueling the communion (albeit one sided) of ideas. And the benefits are not merely theoretical/abstract⁰.

Recent Lit Adventures:

The Road: Lit giant Cormac McCarthy's unanimously celebrated Pulitzer grabbing post-apocalyptic saga hailed by some to be the most depressing book ever. NF loved the book and its ultra minimal style. But the most depressing book ever? No fucking way. Just a very good read. Nothing earth-shatteringly saddening.

Nausea: NF had tried to read this so-called Jean Paul Sartre existential masterpiece three times previously but had failed spectacularly at each try. Then he read some random remark by David Foster Wallace in one of his non-fiction pieces saying it's a work of genius, clenched his fists and ground his teeth in grim determination and forced himself to read it. Verdict? It's a damn fine book. Only too reader-unfriendly - like some early version of Linux dreamed up by a sadist geek. If you're patient enough and have nothing better to do, go through the much hailed novel. (Spoiler?) There is an Aha! moment at the end of the book. And a real one at that.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: No-one writes fiction quite the way David Foster Wallace does - as ecstatically, with as much self consciousness, with as much breathlessness, with as much black humor, with as much style. His incredible attention to detail - in descriptions as much as in the style of writing, just plain brilliant subject matter and the insistence of addressing the important, universal and grabbing-you-by-the-balls-and-demanding-an-immediate-answer-type questions have made a lifelong fan out of Nanga Fakir.

The Depressed Person, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #2, Octet, Suicide as a Sort of Present and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #4 are just plain gems of short stories. NF plans to read this book again. And again. And maybe again.

When Infinite Jest had come out, a lot of people had compared David Foster Wallace's style of writing as similar to Nabokov's. Naturally, once NF was converted, his hunter instincts led him to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. A hundred pages into the book, Nanga Fakir can totally dig why such claims of similarity were made. It manifests in the attention to detail, the delightful wordplay, the abso-fucking-lutely delectable prose and the location of humor in the most unlikely places. The way Nabokov bends and commands the English language and makes an abject slave out of it is simply jaw dropping. Read it to experience this feeling first hand. And on top of this, the transformation of the adventures of such a borderline pedophilic protagonist as Humbert Humbert into a hilarious comedy is a truly non trivial achievement for a belletrist of any order.

And so Nanga Fakir trudges on, slowly, patiently, painstakingly - reading for half an hour, one and sometimes on good, easy, relaxed days, two-three-four (or more!) hours. It's lucky to be taken up so much by some overarching, engrossing activity that holds your attention and trusses you up in a warm, glowing blanket of self sufficient happiness.

BACK TO POST

0. Quote-Unquote:

<*the first floor lobby History Honors Society's book sale. NF with two books in hand - The Best American Short Stories 1986 (Edited by Raymond Carver and featuring stars of the lit firmament like Donald Barthelme, Ann Beattie, David Lipsky, Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff) and Alice Mary Hilton's Logic, Computing Machines and Automation*>

NF: I heard that there's some buy one get one free offer or something?
The (presumably) History Grad Student: <*eyes NF fixedly*> To himself: Who bargains at a book-for-a-buck sale? (Ans: Indian.)
Aloud: Not really. You get one free if you answer a history trivia.
NF: Shoot.
The (presumably) History Grad Student: Where was Josef Stalin born?
NF: <*sports a big grin*>
The (presumably) History Grad Student: <*notices the grin. grins back*>
NF: It's a rather trivial question.
The (presumably) History Grad Student: You think so? The answer might be tricky.
NF: He was born in Georgia.
The (presumably) History Grad Student: Whoa man! You're good.
NF: Can I answer another one and have both of them for free?
The (presumably) History Grad Student: No. You can't.

खूनी खोपड़ी जाग उठी!

दो हफ्ते से सुशुप्त, मूर्छित खूनी खोपड़ी⁰ अंततोगत्वा आज जाग उठी. विकिपीडिया के विरह में लबालब भरी अश्रु-संचित बाल्टियों को नंगा फ़कीर ने उल्लासित चित्त से विदा किया.

निश्चय ही, भगवान् के घर देर है, अंधेर नहीं.

BACK TO POST

0. नंगा फ़कीर के लैपटॉप का नाम.