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!