Richard Corliss profiles the magazine that gave us headlines like "Saddam & Osama Adopt Shaved Ape Baby!" and "Mental Supermen Lock in ESP Duel; Top Psychic's Head Explodes!".
The paper revealed more shocking historical secrets than The Da Vinci Code. It informed us that the seer Nostradamus had an idiot brother, Nostradumbass. One cover story declared that President Lincoln was actually a woman. The headline: "Abe Was a Babe!"
"[W]e should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves." - Pierre Bayard, "How to Discuss Books That One Hasn’t Read"
Absolutely fascinating article in Psychology Today. The authors harness the latest insights of evolutionary psychology to find reasons for several of their sometimes politically incorrect assertions, including almost all suicide bombers being Muslim and the male midlife crisis being a myth.
Women often say no to men. Men have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. Men have built (and destroyed) civilization in order to impress women, so that they might say yes.Read it - you'll be a wiser man (or woman). Sex is the key, isn't it? And isn't that the reason why many of these subjects are politically sensitive? Isn't even race a 'sex' issue? Many of the most important social groupings are defined by who can have sex with whom....
...
Many middle-aged men do go through midlife crises, but it's not because they are middle-aged. It's because their wives are.
Former American President Calvin Coolidge was known as Silent Cal. Once a woman sitting by him at a dinner party said she had made a bet she could get three words out of him. "You lose," he replied.
“Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.” - Nietzsche [philosopher, madman]
“The move from a structuralist account . . . marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony . . .” [Judith Butler, a well-known professor at the University of California – Berkeley]
George Orwell’s putdown of this kind of impenetrability in perhaps his most famous essay:
I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
Here it is in modern English:
“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”
Roger Sandall’s insightful piece on the response to an Islamist preacher calling scantily-clad Australian women ‘exposed meat inviting rape’ touches on Thomas Mann, Nabokov, art, ‘paederaesthetics’ and the sexualization of everyday life.
The so-called artist’s ‘gift’, wrote Thomas Mann in 1903, has dark roots in a poisoned psyche. ‘It is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.’ The world should know that most artists today are sick in mind and spirit, a danger to decent people and heedless of the damage they cause. Plumbers and carpenters and other tradesmen are reliable friends. But artists are not. ... ‘Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate! [Tonio Kröger, Mann]’___________
Fobsie'll like this.
The New York Times' Critics' Choice DVD pick for the week: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin!
If you ignore the wastes in the foreground, and the 'Your future has meaning' hoarding, you could catch parts of newly built beautifull St Martins Church at Palarivattom Junction, Kochi City, Kerala, India.
And if you want to shock yourself with the things that we do to our nature, click here.
Film Info
2006
118 mins
Color
Czech Republic / Slovakia
In Czech with English subtitles
35mm
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Sound: Dolby Digital
“ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST FILMS! A SATIRICAL MASTERPIECE!”
- Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
“Horrific but also funny! Line up outside New York’s Film Forum--and then other theatres nationwide!”
- Stuart Klawans, The Nation
“Raucously inventive and completely out of its mind!”
- Aaron Hillis, Premiere
“A bracing blast of old school surrealism!”
- Dennis Lim, Village Voice
“The last true surrealist...provides the full Svankmajer flavor--as well as a comic metaphor for human existence itself!”
- J. Hoberman, Village Voice
“Marvelous stop-motion animated sequences.”
- Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“Awesome! Plentiful animation sequences!”
- V.A. Musetto, New York Post
“B plus. Darkly comedic...encourages simultaneous laughter, horror and thought. If that isn’t art, what is?”
- Tasha Robinson, The Onion
“An excellent jolt of blasphemy!”
- Nathan Lee, New York Sun
“The Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, Delacroix, orgies and questionable therapeutic practices! Mixes high and low with deranged glee!”
- Time Out, New York
“100% Svankmajer....a potent cocktail....a double-barreled blast of Euro-cult outrageousness!”
- Grady Hendrix, New York Sun
“Svankmajer’s filmic imagination is genius....continues to enthrall, mystify and utterly creep us out!”
- Parisa Vaziri, Film-Forward
“His finest live-action feature to date!”
- Ken Fox, tvguide.com
“Combining horror, comedy, drama and absurdity has rarely been so much fun!”
- NYCMovieGuru.com
“Four stars! (highest rating)”
- Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine
“Intriguing!...Shot through with the Czech director’s customary black humor, and punctuated by some cheerfully gruesome animation...A fully formed film which transcends polemic by an intelligent use of the imagination.”
- Richard James Havis, Hollywood Reporter
“If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.” ~(Oxford University Press style manual).
The workday proves dull not only to the Computer Programmer, but to the novelist. When there's war to attend to, and heartbreak, and class struggle and familial strife and rage against the dying light, why would one preoccupy oneself, when endeavouring to write fiction, with the nine-to-five? Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn't mirror the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life.
...
Contemporary readers like the Marketing Consultant should shudder to the core at [Bartleby's] display of existential freedom.
From God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:
There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.
Tennis again, wondering if Allen Ginsberg is not more important than Alan Greenspan:
Perhaps that makes you the true misfit -- one who does not even recognize it and would disavow it if asked. When asked to consider the useful social role he plays, the philosophical rebel prefers not to. Or has something happened to the currency of the idea itself of the rebel of conscience, the revolutionary of the soul, the transcendence seeker? ... [The philosophical rebel] alone has the courage to say, "I have no clue what this shit is." ... he does not jump when the Man says jump -- he scarcely moves; he hardly hears the Man; he can hardly even see him; he has to squint. It's his constitution to be cautious and to ask the relevant question Why? ... Could it be that the voice of what you want is God's voice? Could it be that what you want is what God wants? Could it be that you are eating and sleeping and fucking for God? And if that is God's voice then what is this other voice that would hobble the hipster and tie him down, would frighten him into a frightful day job he half believes in and half detests? That must be the voice of the devil!
Cary Tennis at Salon.com:
In the lizard mind where all things are writ backward on the mirror in God's pink lipstick, I am you and you are me. We become what we behold, as Blake said. What we see is what we are. If you are naked I am naked. We are porous in the sensorium of sex. We are not impervious; we cannot look at it without tingling. It hijacks our sex. So if we do not like porn it may be because porn is too powerful. We don't care to lose our freedom to this thing, to have our sex run off one way while we who were children once gape in astonishment and wonder and frightful surprise at the size, the perfection, the wetness, the hairlessness, the lips, the machines.
Know these attempts:
The Whole Earth Catalog
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory - as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.
The doings of Cho Seung-Hui have brought the 2005 Korean film Oldboy into public discourse.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (11 Nov 1922 - 11 Apr 2007)
Listen to the title character in his 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”
It’s 50 years since the introduction of Helvetica, which has been called the official typeface of the 20th century.
midnight
pigs, ducks, chicken and cattle shrieked and tore the sky into two.
blood flood the kitchen floor
women smelled of grease and garlic
bottles are emptied
bowels are cleared
morning air, stayed like a drunkard's breath
christ is up in the air
sermons are given and doors closed
churchyard quite and strewn with color rags
at home, food, laughter and howls started
family feuds are renewed for the coming year
then people strayed out
ducked the police on the streets.
Happy Easter was a Drunken Roar.
‘All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.’ ~ Aristotle
‘We must cultivate our garden.’ ~ Voltaire
‘Like the bee, we should make our industry our amusement.’ ~ Oliver Goldsmith
‘There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.’ ~Thoreau
‘I do not like work even when someone else does it.’ ~ Mark Twain
‘Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.’ ~ James Matthew Barrie
‘To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.’ ~ John Dewey
‘I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.’ ~ Jerome K. Jerome
‘The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce. You can’t weigh the soul of a man with a bar of pig-iron.’ ~ Samuel Gompers
‘One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours -- all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.’ ~ William Faulkner
‘To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.’ ~ Pearl S Buck
‘Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.’ ~ Elbert Hubbard
‘What is the good of being a genius if you cannot use it as an excuse for being unemployed?’ ~ Gerald Barzan
‘If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.’ ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
‘Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.’ ~ Margaret Fuller
‘Life is just a dirty four-letter word: W-O-R-K.’ ~ J. P. Mcevoy
‘No man ever said on his deathbed, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”’ ~ Senator Paul Tsongas
‘The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.’ ~ Robert B. Reich
‘Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.’
[...] that sequence in Music in Darkness where the gallant young soldier gets blinded for life while trying to save a cute little puppy from Swedish friendly fire captures Ingmar Bergman at his most profoundly misanthropic, resolutely non-life-affirming and precociously cynical. To be born blind is tragic enough, but to be blinded during a fruitless puppy-rescuing operation suggests that God is not only cruel but possesses a demented sense of humour. As does Ingmar Bergman.
I'm often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: "Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world." [...] "Be serious." By which I meant: never be cynical. And which doesn't preclude being funny. [...] "Take care to be born at a time when it was likely that you would be definitively exalted and influenced by Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, and Turgenev, and Chekhov."
A great writer of fiction both creates - through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms - a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.
But of course, the primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) To write is to know something. What a pleasure to read a writer who knows a great deal. (Not a common experience these days ... ) Literature, I would argue, is knowledge - albeit, even at its greatest, imperfect knowledge. Like all knowledge.
Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate - and, therefore, improve - our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.
[...] ("Time exists in order that it doesn't happen all at once ... space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.")
To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.
To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention. [...]
For those who have anything to do with Africa..
Liberia: Peace in Progressby Paolo Pellegrin
http://todayspictures.slate.com/20070209/
Checked out The Onion recently? Here are some headlines from ‘America’s finest news source’:
‘Thousands More Dead In Continuing Iraq Victory’
‘Troop Morale Boosted By Surprise Visit From First Dog’
‘Dictator Slays Millions In Last-Minute Push To Be Time’s Man Of The Year’
‘15,000 Brown People Dead Somewhere’
‘Pope Admits: 'God Ain't Said Shit To Me'’
‘Vatican Unveils New Rosary For Windows’
‘Christ Kills Two, Injures Seven In Abortion-Clinic Attack’
‘20 Terrorists under 20: A Look at the Dynamic Youths Most Determined to Make a Difference to Your Community’
‘Girl Moved To Tears By Of Mice And Men Cliffs Notes’
‘Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index’
‘America Online To Build Three Million Home Pages For The Homeless’
‘NASA Launches Probe To Inform Pluto Of Demotion’
‘New Study Too Frightening To Release’
For a month starting mid-December, Kashi Art Gallery, Mattancherry, hosted artist Bose Krishnamachari’s Laboratory of Visual Arts (LaVA), an installation comprising a collection of books and DVD’s freely accessible to all visitors. The generous facilities included half a dozen wide screen LCD TV’s and many portable DVD players.
Work prevented me from spending all my waking hours at the gallery, which is just 3 km from home. Nevertheless the weekends were a treat, with the following films resurrecting the cineaste in me:
Dont Look Back: a documentary by D A Pennebaker covering the ever fascinating Bob Dylan’s mid-60’s tour of England.
L’Atalante: a classic romance considered the masterpiece of 1930’s French filmmaker Jean Vigo, who died at the age of 29.
The Decalogue – Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4: I could manage to see only the first four chapters of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s series of hour-long films made for Polish TV in the eighties, based on the Ten Commandments.
Jules et Jim: the classic film of the ménage à trois – a very French film by Francois Truffaut.
La Jetée: Chris Marker’s brilliant experimental film is high-concept science fiction – a highly original meditation on images and memory. Such a big punch in less than half an hour.
Aparajito and The World of Apu: Two and three in Satyajit Ray’s renowned Apu trilogy. Straightforward storytelling, lyrical cinema. Love Apu, love life.
Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or: Luis Buñuel may be the baddest of cinema’s bad boys. Wild, crazy, offensive, exasperating, nonsensical. In other words, Surreal. With help from Salvador Dali.
The Seventh Seal: Ingmar Bergman proves that cinema can be the vehicle for the profoundest meditation. If the theatre has Hamlet, the cinema has this b&w beauty. Awe-inspiring.
Paths of Glory: Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant, passionate (anti-)war film.
Meshes of the Afternoon: Maya Deren’s short film is as avant-garde as they come. The higher mathematics of cinema – not for me.
Short Cuts: Robert Altman’s masterful adaptation of Raymond Carver’s assorted short stories runs an exhilarating three hours plus. The screenplay is a tour de force.
The Matrix Revolutions: Eyecandy/mentalfloss, by the brothers Wachowski. Third in trilogy.
One day, I was traveling with my father's friend from his house to mine, in Lagos, former capital of Nigeria. As we turned the corner and entered the Pfizer Road we saw a large group of people coming towards us. I thought it was a traditional Yoruba masquerade group which is a common sight in Nigeria. My father’s friend pulled the car out of the road and parked it, but kept the engine running. As the group came closer, we realized that it was not a masquerade. We saw a large naked woman being chased by a motley group of people. She was neither running nor walking. Suddenly the big group was in front of us. Three or four kids with shattered branches were running along her. Every now and then they beat her and the branches cracked loudly on her skin like a whip. She was not crying. Actually there was no expression on her face except for deadly paleness which shows tremendous fear. Her dark brown skin was glistening with sweat and blood. The kids seem to be thoroughly enjoying what they were doing. A man with a huge potbelly was trotting behind the naked woman holding a can. Obviously he is carrying petrol. And then we saw a kid, rolling a car tyre among the crowd. “Oh shit they are going to burn her” my father’s friend said. With a shock, we realized that we are part of an execution. The group was driving her towards the large bush beyond the dead end of the road. Even though the car’s a/c was on, my father’s friend was sweating profusely. I was confused, and started asking him questions. Under his breath he told me that the woman must’ve stolen something and was caught red handed. Now they will take her, into the bush and put the tyre around her head, pour petrol and would burn her alive. By that time the group had moved much behind us and into the bush.
We both sat frozen in the car. Then few women with kids on their back came along. I quickly opened the door and asked them what’s happening.” She is a thief” they said. “She had stolen a loaf of bread and a pair of cloth from someone’s house”. My father’s friend jammed on the gas and the car screeched on to the road. We drove like crazy before the burning smell of the tyre reached us.
Suddenly I am seized by the thoughts of this great soul.
The path breaker. One of the reasons why we have, the so called 'Kerala model'.
It was a perfect fall.
vulnerability - flesh against thorn
brittleness - bone against stone
abrasion - sand against face
crackle - skull against flint.
whistle - mouthful of wind through the lungs
red - blurred sting in the eyes
thought - muffled and petered by a choke
fear - vague dull heat in the guts.
It was a perfect fall.
Joy is heavy vehicle driver. To be more accurate, he used to be a heavy vehicle driver. As a youth he was fascinated by vehicles. But unlike others, his passion was for heavy vehicles like Lorries, tippers, JCBies and bulldozers etc. So after getting a heavy vehicle license, he left for Middle East, where he had opportunities to fulfill his passion. Within couple of years, he became an expert in driving all kinds of heavy vehicles. He came back home after three years and got married to a beautiful girl. Marriage photo at his home shows a perfect couple. Joy beaming with joy. Handsome Joy with beautiful Mary. After a month long honeymoon, Joy left Mary at home and went back to Middle East. Three more years went by, and to Mary's joy, Joy came back home. He brought jewelleries and cloths for Mary.
After a week, Joy threw a party at the local toddy shop for all his friends. With toddy, they had boiled cassava and fish, shell fish, duck curry, fried crabs, huge fish heads and what not.. The court musicians sang the saddest songs on request and a glass of toddy. The court jesters cracked the wildest and the funniest jokes that sent Joy rolling on the mud floor with laughter. The party went on till mid night. Party stopped only when the supplies stopped. Joy had the time of his life. After six years of hard life in the desert, Joy relished warmth of his people, the camaraderie of the drunkards.
The very next morning, Joy came back to the toddy shop, and then party started. Party continued for three months. Then it was time for Joy to go back. But Joy extended his leave and partied more. Money in his account dried out. Joy pawned his jewelleries and partied more. Joy got a telegram saying that he no longer had any job. Joy put his hand on his wife’s jewelleries and partied more. By this time, apart from the toddy shop he started visiting Navaratna bar, one of our town’s important watering holes.
The time when his parties were solely sponsored by his wife’s Jewelleries, which was quite a lot, Joy started his famous swinging between the bars. He starts his day at the neighborhood’s friendly toddy shop and then swing to Navaratna bar and from there he swings to Premier bar and then to Swapna and then to Alankar and by teatime he will be promptly back at the friendly toddy shop to restart the cycle. Navaratna-Premier-Swapna-Alankar. It was during this time one of the witty bar birds named him Tarzan Joy for his famous swinging between the bars. The name stuck. Even his wife, during their hugely rare courtships, lovingly calls him Tarzan. And he loved it. That is the story of Tarzan Joy.
The reason for this entry is that, I saw Joy this morning near my house with some of his cronies. When I asked him what’s happening, he said that they are all going for fishing in the river. And that is what he does for his living.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
‘McCarthy’s last two books have been lamentations for lost worlds. In No Country for Old Men, he mourned the disappearance of morality, while in The Road he mourns the disappearance of, well, everything, creating a postapocalyptic novel that successfully marries Beckett with Mad Max. It’s both a serious meditation on the purpose of life and the best end-of-the-world horror flick you’ve ever seen.’
The Queen
‘The year’s best movie—directed by Stephen Frears from a witty and elegant script by Peter Morgan—is a quasi comedy of grand manners with the world’s least likely heroine: the stuffy Elizabeth II, who can’t even bring herself to make a public statement of grief on the occasion of Diana’s untimely death. As the monarch whose features barely bestir themselves, Dame Helen Mirren (in the performance of the year) uses one of the most expressive faces in film to signal the teensiest signs of tension between the monarch and the human being.’
In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce is one of them.
A perceptive and witty book that is set to become the definitive generalist’s account of India’s political, economic and social development and its future prospects.
From the NYT:
In the 1600s the total number of books available to a literate Englishman was about 2,000. Now, more than 2,000 are published a week, with 10,000 new novels every year. Given a 40-hour reading week, a 46-week working year and three hours per novel, you would need 163 lifetimes to read them all, John Sutherland calculates in his new book, “How to Read a Novel,” which aims to be a user-friendly guide to negotiating this morass. “Done well, a good reading is as creditable as a 10-scoring high dive,” he writes. “It is, I would maintain, almost as difficult to read a novel well as to write one well.” A dubious but nevertheless terrifying proposition, calling to mind the girl at the cocktail party in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” who declares to the room, “I finally had an orgasm, and my doctor said it was the wrong kind.”
Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly:
For those of us who prefer to judge Gibson solely in terms of his art, the movie is a virtuosic piece of action cinema -- particularly in its second half...And while there has been no shortage of recent films that decry the horrors of war and man's inhumanity to his fellow man, I know of none other quite this sickeningly powerful.
Ben Stein in the conservative US magazine The American Enterprise, November 1999:
In 1776, without the benefit of word processing, the Internet, or Starbucks Coffee, three of the four greatest non-fiction works in the English language were published. In America, Thomas Jefferson, with some help, wrote the [American] Declaration of Independence. In Great Britain, Gibbon produced his masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And in Scotland, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, by far the most important work of political economy ever published. (The fourth and perhaps most important document of all, the U.S. Constitution, came about a decade later.)
from Douglas Browning, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin.
The Wall Street Journal has a weekly column ‘Five Best’ that has a personality nominating his choice of the five best books on a variety of themes.
Radio 3’s 100 most influential artistic and cultural figures of the century (The Independent, Jan 1998).
David Sexton is the literary editor of the Evening Standard (
It’s all a matter of perception, isn’t it? Sometimes all this seems so irrelevant, trivial. At certain times you forget what has at other times been a lifeline to yourself. Thus with blogging.
And anyway the idea of this blog has been to say something when one has something to say. So what if I still have nothing to say? I want to say that I have nothing to say tonight. Ciao!
A boy and his father are walking on a bridge.
Son asks, what you call the water that is flowing under us.
The father answers quite seriously.
It is called a river, and it called so, because it flowing under a bridge.
The world is getting fucked up and poeple getting thoughtless so fast,
soon the above said incident will happen.
Death is nothing but the grace ful release of elements back into the universe,
our last gasp going back to join the great howl of the unfathomable emptiness.
Exactly one year ago, far away in Russia, in a town named Beslan, agitating for the right to self-determination for their province, against repression and injustice, a handful of men took hostage a school-full of children, strapping bombs all over the place and around the kids. Somewhere amidst the stridency of the demands, the self-righteousness of the government, the edginess of the negotiators, patience ran out. Commandos invaded the fortified school, the men opened fire, the faces of children splattered in blood, a cruel dance of death lay waste victims, martyrs, monsters. The death of a few hundred children caught the world’s attention, yielded incredible images for the news bulletins. A little child faint in a commando’s arms, teachers rushing into the rain of bullets to pull away any of the frantic children, parents beating to death one of the hostage-takers who had rushed out of the building now erupting in flames. If you saw it, you would gasp, wince, choke.
Yesterday morning, BBC radio news had a piece on Beslan. After telling us of the new school building with all modern facilities like an up-to-date computer centre, the reporter speaks to one of the children who survived, one who survived the fear, the pain and the memories:
‘What do you feel when you think about that day?’
‘If my pain were to be measured in volts, it would be,’ she chokes, ‘nine-hundred-million-volts.’
Two months ago, the pogroms and bloodbaths that accompanied the re-drawing of maps of the Balkans, were far from forgotten. But a television station refused to let old perpetrators feign their peace. It audaciously broadcast at prime time a tape it had found – a recording of the cold-blooded killing of a few men: men in army-fatigues unload these men, their arms cuffed behind their backs, march them to a convenient spot, and shoot them one by one. The cameraman is walking amongst the killers – he is not hiding. What is remarkable is that none of the victims struggle; months of war have rubbed the futility of panic or pleading into them.
As the tape was broadcast, an old woman was settling down to her evening’s lonely gaze into the television. She couldn’t follow what was going on. The camera panned to a face, a bullet would pierce into the head, just above the ear, then a dull thud. Then to another face. Suddenly she sits up. The photograph on top of the TV is that of the face in the TV. At the precise moment she realizes that it is her son, missing for so many years, on the TV, the face winces, another thud.
Man turning on man. The victims of passion, and let us not forget, of ideas. Freedom, religion, communism, and so many more. Who was responsible for more human deaths than anyone else in history? The answer, I read today, is Mao Zedong. Chairman Mao of China. A monster? An idealist. The passion of ideas may cloud men’s minds so dangerously, that they lose all perspective. Is that idea worth this cost? Some never stop to consider. Hitler thought himself an idealist, Pol Pot attempted to create a rural Utopia.
That is why your idea is as good as mine. If what I say refutes what you say solely because it is what I say, and not because of its soundness, then there’s a problem.
Religion, philosophy, art, indeed civilization, are just modes of communication. I think this, you think that, they say this, she wrote that: now what are we to do? To stick to your own idea as gospel truth is to deny civilization itself. Humanity’s attempt at understanding Truth comes closest to success through a communion of minds. Together we work at this jigsaw puzzle of the human predicament, try to stay alive, find some fun. What more do we want? And who wants to send 900,000,000 volts through a child’s heart?
_______________
Postscript (source: Time magazine):
Emperor Hirohito was the titular head of Japan during World War II. Interrupting the conference that decided to wage war on the US, this reluctant warmonger recited a poem that his grandfather Meiji had once written in similar circumstances:
Though I consider the surrounding seas as my brothers
Why is it that the waves should rise so high?
It was an oblique call for restraint.
Three years later, after atomic bombs and fire-bombings, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender with these words:
‘We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable.’
Whew. That was frantic. Just handed over to the courier a few reports that were already too late last week. Had thought to complete them during that much-anticipated three-day weekend. But immersed myself in books – and drowned. Woke up with a hangover today morning.
Sophocles’ Ajax, Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I, Milton’s Samson Agonistes: O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon… – Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves…(Just two lines from Milton’s play: either has inspired the title of well known books – Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza.)
Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is one of the most gripping things I ever remember reading – a rich, suggestive, puzzle of a book – Poe and poetry…. It has been called the greatest ghost story ever penned; it is said to have inspired more commentary and discussion than Joyce’s Ulysses!
Sunday I spent with a collection of 20th century short stories edited by Clifton Fadiman. A treasure inspiring fascinating discoveries. Stunners like Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Babylon Revisited’, my first piece by Jorge Luis Borges – a tantalizing ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’. The same collection had earlier offered me Kafka’s unforgettable ‘In the Penal Colony’. And I’m through only a quarter of this almost 900-page volume.
Gracias.
Went shopping for books last week – used books. The bounty:
1. The Complete Plays of Sophocles
2. Parallel Lives (Selections) (2 vol), Plutarch
3. The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha
4. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
5. The Ethics and Selected Letters, Baruch Spinoza
6. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
7. The Turn of the Screw & Daisy Miller, Henry James
8. Eight Great Comedies
9. Swann’s Way (Part 1 of 7 of Remembrance of Things Past), Marcel Proust
10. Ulysses, James Joyce
11. ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
12. The Waning of the Middle Ages, J Huizinga
13. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
14. Catch 22, Joseph Heller
15. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
All for Rs 620. Bargain. [Understatement.]
Came across this during my last visit to Eloor lending library. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and successful seducer of women and priest of the parish of Loudun, was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of being in league with the devil and seducing an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier maintained his innocence to the end and four years after his death the nuns were still being subjected to exorcisms to free them from their demonic bondage. Huxley’s vivid account of this bizarre tale of religious and sexual obsession transforms our understanding of the medieval world.
‘When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical may be madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness. To seek treasures where there is only trash… Too much sanity may be madness, and maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.’
- Miguel De Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha
In 2002, around 100 well-known authors from 54 countries voted for the ‘most meaningful book of all time’ in a poll organised by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo. Miguel de Cervantes’ tale of misguided heroism gained 50% more votes than any other book. ‘If there is one novel you should read before you die, it is Don Quixote,’ the Nigerian author Ben Okri said.
Here’s the full list of the 100 best works of fiction, as selected by them, alphabetically by author.
I was just going through my old works, and this was one of my favourite stilllife.
apples and pots 2003:
Software: Alias Wavefront Maya
Mumbai_Clipping_02
The pimp pressed a switch on the wall and an irritating ring like that ofa fire alarm is heard. Beyond the violet and dirty chinese silk curtainsome movements could be sensed.The pimp slipped his head into the curtain and said something in marathi,then came back with a reassuring smile.Slowly the girlsstarted to come,one by one,and stood against the wall. The pimp pressed anotherswitch on the wall and a harsh thousand watt bulb came into life, making the girls squint, which made them look vulnerable even in their gaudy makeup.Few of them tried to look attractive, so they smiled with their bright redlips.Rest of them look bored, and they looked elsewhere. The pimp now came to each customer and asked them to point out the ones they want. One of them pointed out a girl, other two mentioned the colour of the cloth the girls of their choice were wearing. Once the selection is over the pimp told the girls to go and follows them behind the curtain. Now the room is empty except for a dirty fish tank in the corner of the room.Inside its green murkiness a large fish could be seen swimming in a circle. Almost like chasing its own tail.Then a beautiful bangled hand comes out of the curtain and switch of the hot bulb.Blue light prevails.
Mumbai_Clipping_01
A young wealthy looking man is buying cigarretes from a rickey old shop.
A street dog sniff at his feet. he looks at the dog lovingly and buys a
packet of biscuit, tear open the pack and drop the biscuits on the curb and
walks off. The dog sniff at the biscuits. Suddenly a wrinkled up old woman
climbs out of the shop and shove the dog away, picks up all the biscuits and
climb back into the shop.The dog look puzzled at the shop and then at me, the
witness.
One day, when I was in class seven our young Maths teacher was talking about logic.
To illustrate his point he said
God is love
Love is blind
Therefore
God is blind.
Even though I was a hardboiled Catholic at that time, I was impressed by the power of logic to prove god is blind. Later in my late teens I met philosophy and found logic in its finest form there. So, if I go back to the exercise of making the god blind now, I have to face the impossible task of defining god and love. So it is not only logic but but also words and statements with concrete meaning that philosophy wants. Philosophy stays away from ambiguity. It demands clarity and exactness. Over the years philosophy has been considered dry and unpoetic. On the contrary, philosophy is the poetry of unshakable truth, as beautiful and as unbreakable as a Diamond.
