The Nihilist's Comeuppance

From the fabulous SMBC:

(Click for larger image.)

The Killing Joke

Courtesy: Tyler Cowen of the Marginal Revolution.

Inexistentialism

NF's often been led to wonder if the existentialists' claim of finding subjective meaning in a meaningless, objective universe via love or religion or music or art or whatever isn't the classic case of the placebo effect's surprising efficacy even when its being placebo is known to the subjects.

The Reader

Books read in the last year: January '11 to January '12

1) Sacred Games (Vikram Chandra)
2) The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
3) मंटो की विश्वप्रसिद्ध कहानियां (सआदत हसन मंटो) (Manto's World Famous Stories (Saadat Hasan Manto))
4) Through the Glass Darkly (Donna Leon)
5) The Big Short (Michael Lewis)
6) Our Band Could be Your Life (Michael Azerrad)
7) 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
8) The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (Nikolai Gogol)
9) Death in Venice (Thomas Mann)
10) The Immoralist (Andre Gide)
11) Between Parantheses (Roberto Bolaño)
12) Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
13) Liar's Poker (Michael Lewis)
14) River of Gods (Ian McDonald)
15) No Longer Human (Osamu Dazai)
16) The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)
17) What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakmai)
18) सतह से उठता आदमी (मुक्तिबोध) (Man Rising From the Surface (Muktibodh))
19) Sputnik Sweetheart (Haruki Murakami)
20) Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami)
21) Demons (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) (reread)
22) The Blue Bedspread (Raj Kamal Jha)
23) The Third Reich (Roberto Bolaño)

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!