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Sarpvinash

SoonIWillBeInvincible.com

From the Onion's

Your Horoscope

March 11, 2008 | Issue 44•11

 Taurus April 20 - May 20

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, which explains why you keep trying to invade Russia during the summer of 1941.

No, I've never seen the celebrated Tony Richardson film but something in the title has always resonated with me, ever since I saw a poster in the Riverside theatre when I was a student in London.

Recently events conspired so that I had a situation fraught with many tensions on my hands. Now that phase is over and there is a sudden emptiness where there was once activity.

bergemot  was here, in a visit enjambed with various surreal moments. Isn't it strange, you are classmates with someone in university, then meet five years later at their wedding and then 6 months later for making a reality show. Bergemot moved into my room while I was a temporary refugee in the hall.

After someone has left, they leave behind faint traces of their presence, objects and artifacts trapping a little of their advent.
My wardrobe even now has a faint, barely detectable feminine aura, if you will - trace elements of Bergemot. Tomorrow it will be gone.  The room, which bore the distinct mark of another personality superimposed on the "Sarpvinashness", is reverting to its native structure.


Despite all our restless frettings over the world, how impermanent our presence is, how easily forgotten we will be. Someone said "we begin as the dreams of our parents and end as the memories of our grandchildren." As Kim Novak says in Vertigo, in the famous scene in the Sequoia forest,  "Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice." For some reason I always remember this scene as it is featured in Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys when Bruce Willis and Madeline Stowe are watching it while on the run.

Anyway we go on, and as Mervyn Peake might put it, always in the distance, you hear the great, wild beat of Time's wings.


***

I had taken Bergemot to some of the better coffee shops that the fair city has to offer. The decor, the faces, the muzak - I was thinking of Castell's theories of spaces - of first world and third world spaces, of how a five-star restaurant in Kinshasa or Toronto will see the same kind of people congregate and slum dwellers in Bombay or La Paz  will find a common language.

Category:American serial killers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Classification: People: By occupation: Serial killers: By nationality: American also: United States: People: By occupation: Serial killers

Pages in category "American serial killers"

There are 166 pages in this section of this category.

A Type I error occurs when a true hypothesis is rejected, and a Type II error occurs when a false hypothesis is accepted. [...] When money is being distributed, the stereotypical liberal tries especially hard to avoid Type I errors (the deserving not receiving their share), whereas the stereotypical conservative is more concerned with avoiding Type II errors (the undeserving receiving more than their share). When punishment is being meted out, the stereotypical conservative is more concerned with avoiding Type I errors (the deserving or guilty not receiving their due), whereas the stereotypical liberal worries more about avoiding Type II errors (the undeserving or innocent receiving undue punishment).

John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy, 1988.

The plot moves like a bicycle with a bent front wheel. Scenes crash together like cars on an icy interstate. The entire film wanders around like a child lost in a department store looking for its Mommy.

                                         Mr Cranky's review of the "perfectly bad" Perfect Stranger

Message from HUTCH

"Hi, Pay your Hutch bill of Rs 24,945/- before 30th and get Rs. 50 worth SMS absolutely FREE."

  What does the brutal career of one of Africa’s most infamous despots have to do with the land of lochs and glens one might ask. Idi Amin Dada, the military ruler of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, in the unpredictable, bizarre manner of dictators everywhere had a love for all things Scottish even going so far as to appear in public wearing a kilt and naming his sons Campbell and McKenzie.

 

Uganda, which became independent from the British in 1962, was soon bemired in the endless cycle of coups and counter-coups that became routine for the newly independent African states. Amin, who started his career as a cook in the British colonial army rose swiftly through the ranks once Uganda gained freedom eventually becoming the head of the army. From there, to staging a coup and seizing power was a routine exercise.

Amin’s rule after showing initial promise soon became a blood-drenched nightmare as the increasingly paranoiac dictator began executing anyone whom he thought could pose a threat to his regime. Amnesty International has estimated that over 500,000 Ugandans were killed during Amin’s reign.

Two good articles by Gary Kamiya, an editor at the online magazine Salon. Both apparently unconnected do have a common thread running through them. I will just give the lead paragraphs and you can go to the site if they prove to be of sufficient interest. I must warn that Salon is an ad-supported magazine and you will have to jump through a few hoops before getting where you want to.

The first article is on that perennial favourite, how much is the modern day American "Hyperpower" similar to the Roman Empire. The discussion actually centres around the Fall. Signs and omens are interpreted to indicate the imminent demise or not of Pax Americana. The blurb goes : "Hollowed out by arrogance, corruption and a bloated military, the greatest empire the world has ever known fell. Is America doomed to follow in its footsteps?"

Comparing the present historical epoch to a past one is an excellent intellectual parlor game. It requires you to know enough about the two periods to assess their similarities and differences. It encourages a broad, synthetic analysis and a long view. And it defamiliarizes the present, forcing you to look with fresh eyes at cultural and political realities you had previously taken for granted. At its worst, it can become a mere display of superficial knowledge, in which facile analogies take the place of real engagement. But at its best, it can illuminate both periods, creating that simultaneous sense of recognition and mystery that the best history does.

The article is actually a review of "Are we Rome?" by Cullen Murphy and summarizes the arguments cogently. The next is "I'm Younger than that now" which is about the author going past the half-century mark; "My knees are shot and my past is gaining on me. At 53, it's time to admit defeat -- and start living again."

Now my friends are gone/ And my hair is gray/ I ache in the places where I used to play/ And I'm crazy for loving/ But I'm not coming on. -- Leonard Cohen, "Tower of Song"

Lately I've been asking myself: When did I get so damn old?

Will it be on Saturday, when my son graduates from high school? Did it start 10 years ago, when my knees gave out and I had to say goodbye to sports other than bocce ball? Was it last week, when I saw my reflection before I was ready and was shocked by the man with thinning hair and white in his beard who looked back at me? Was it five years ago, when a doorman in Copenhagen stopped me as I was about to walk into a club filled with 20-somethings with the soul-shriveling words, "There's nothing for you here, sir"? Or did it start decades ago, a long defeat measured in fears not overcome, things not said?

The rest can be read here.

It is my birthday today. Another day, another year. As the poet has said, "Is all our Life, then but a dream/
Seen faintly in the goldern gleam/ Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?"

I thought I'll put some poetry up, some melancholic favourites from my bygone youth. I don't feel old, but I guess that is what people keep saying right until they step into the Great Beyond. Really, I feel pretty much like how I was in 9th standard - it is as if I stopped growing after that. Of course, there have been a thousand subtle ways that I have changed, but somehow in the inner world, I still feel 14 years old. A gift, a curse.

I look back at birthday's past. Last year, I was in Hyderabad and had dinner at Fusion9, the year before, had the best birthday bash in living memory in Bangalore. A surprise party, complete with cake and rendition of the Happy Birthday song, in the company of friends and brothers. Thinking of it, the only other birthday party was when I was 6 years. Vague memories - there are still a few fading photographs in the album. About 7-8 kids, mostly neighbours and classmates. We cut a cake and everyone received gifts - erasers and candy mostly. A friend dropped in unexpectedly and gave me as a present the only thing he had on him - a Nataraj pencil, slightly chewed at the end. Somehow still remember that - also got a Frisbee from two close friends at that time, a brother and sister, who are now settled in the US. Haven't heard from them in over a decade. Wonder what they are upto now.

Ok, enough with the maudlin ramblings. Here is an old favourite by Yeats, much beloved since my Literature student days in Class XI.


The Song of Wandering Aengus

WENT out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

 

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

 

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

I was born late at night, near the midnight hour. People keep saying that is what accounts for my nisachar like behaviour. Guess that will stick with me throughout my life. Every now and then I try to "reset" the system clock but like a ball being forced beneath the water, it keeps bobbing up and reasserting its hold over my life. "Postive attitude" people say that there are channels in the brain. And like water eroding through rock, your behaviour over time cuts pathways through the brain and you have to keep following the same course again and again, borne by the current. Postive folks do say, that with a great effort of will you can direct these rivers to new direction, into new canals in the topography of the mind. That is all one should wish for really. A spirit of renewal, of freshness that should guide us. For, to complete, the poem quoted above, by Lewis Caroll from Sylive and Bruno, Man's little Day in haste we spend,/And, from its merry noontide, send/No glance to meet the silent end.

I had posted an excerpt from Shelley's Elegy to Keats last year. Here is the concluding stanza from Asia's Song.


We have passed Age’s icy caves,
    And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves,
And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray;
    Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee
    Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day;

    A paradise of vaulted bowers
    Lit by downward-gazing flowers,
    And watery paths that wind between
    Wildernesses calm and green,
Peopled by shapes too bright to see,
And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee;
Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously!

Asia's Song is part of the epic Prometheus Unbound.Another classic that I have yet to tackle!

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

 

I was supposed to write a review of "Eklavya" ages ago but never got around to it. Immediately after watching I had jotted down a few hurried impressions but apart from that my memory through a merciful intercession has banished the experience to oblivion. So, here it is, for whatever its worth. I can't be bothered with explaining what it is all about so this is strictly for those who have already seen the movie.

First off, the legend of Eklavya, the Nishada prince from the Mahabharata is absolutely kick-ass especially in its portrayal of Arjuna as a craven, talentless buffon and Drona as a ruthless royal toady lacking all sense of honour. The story, despite its tamely conformist ending subtly wrecks the dominant drive of the epic. I mean this is one of the things that makes the Mahabharat rock, this tension inbuilt into the narrative. The Eklavya episode and the House of Lac (Kunti gets a low-caste woman and her five sons drunk and burns them alive in the house to provide the necessary corpses that will mislead the Kauravas) are some of these "spiky" moments that explode the epic from within. Ok, I know that the point or "moral of the story" is to show how honour-bound Eklavya is compared to Drona and co. I think even more crucial is the hint that there were many who were even more talented than Arjuna (leaving Karna aside) but their gifts and achievements have been supressed by the dominant social order. Anyway, what does the movie have to do all with this? Very little.

The credit sequence has Amitabh recounting the Eklavya story set to some shoddy animation.  The story is set in Rajasthan of the present day ( I just read that it is actually in the period just after Independence, guess I wasn't paying attention), concerning itself exclusively with a "royal" household. The intrigue, as such, is utterly predictable and the ending can be seen a mile off.
Amitabh plays the loyal retainer whose loyalty extends to impregnating the queen and facilitating the production of a heir. He is supposed to be the ultimate bodyguard with an over-extended sequence showcasing his supposed prowess with a throwing knife. However, later, there is a key scene when the king is under attack and Amitabh fails utterly to protect him. The movie is tagged as "Eklavya - The Royal Guard" -
Errr..how exactly does one guard anything when performing a shavasana in front of a herd of lolloping camels?

For some reason the cinematography has been praised; I found it too "shiny" and "flat". The lushness and detailing that the subject matter requires was not there. Correct me, but shouldn't there be a visual plan for such scripts, unifying all the images to a particular "look" or tone?

The only worthwhile sequence - in fact which stands out like an oasis in this desert - is a set-piece in a darkened movie hall.

As for the actors, Sanjay Dutt's character has a decent premise but the plot doesen't use it, Jackie Shroff does a good job in his limited role.
Vidya Balan's is coquettish and coy, simpering and snickering through her lines. Tied with the lack of conflict is that you actually root for the villains. They have a simple, easily understandable motives for all their actions, the motives that drive Eklavya and the other "good guys" is something we cannot relate to.

The whole affair is airless and curiously lifeless. Conflict is the heart of any story and Conflict is absent here. We are totally detached from the sealed world of the decaying feudal order.  For example, perhaps one of the characters could want to turn the palace into a luxury hotel, or there is a struggle with poor peasants for land or something, anything that represents colliding forces which are larger than the characters. All great stories have conflicts with the characters atleast partially representing historical forces, with one supplanting the other. The period of transition is usually fertile grounds for writers to place their stories in. Eklavya sadly lacks all understanding of this broader picture.

One of my favourite SF authors has been Brian Aldiss, who is probably known to the general public through his short story "Supertoys last all summer long", which was the inspiration for Kubrick/Spielberg's disastrous "AI". I don't remember the first story I read of his, probably "Heresies of the Huge God", which was quite unlike anything I had read until then. My school library had a good collection of anthologies including a run of Edmund Crispin's "Best SF" series and these were often the doorways to particular authors. The first Aldiss novel I read was "Hothouse" which I remember reading in the course of one glorious Saturday afternoon in 9th standard. The world which Aldiss evokes is amazing in profusion of detail and you can almost taste the weltering heat of Earth in the far future.
I have already excerpted from his dictionary of "Confluence", and the smashing beginning of "Cracken at Critical". Here is another "pre-script" from his famous work "Cryptozoic" originally published as "An Age".

They lay heaped about meaninglessly, and yet with a terrible meaning that hinted of the force which had flung them here. They seemed to be something between the inorganic and the organic. They proliferated on the margins of time, embodying all the amazing forms the world was to carry; the earth was having a nightmare of stone about the progeny that would swarm over it.

These copromorphic forms suggested, elephants, seals, diplodoci, strange squamata and sauropods, beetles, bats, octopoidal fragments, penguins, woodlice, hippos, living or dying.

Ungainly reminders of the human physique also appeared: torsos, thighs, groins lightly hollowed, backbones, breasts, suggestion of hands and fingers, massive shoulders, phallic shapes: all distinct and yet all merged with the stranger anatomies about them in this forlorn agony of nature - and all moulded mindlessly out of the grey putty without thought turned out, without thought to be obliterated.

They stretched as far as the eye could see, piled on top of each other, as if they filled the entire Cryptozoic.....or as if they were the sinister fore-shadowings of what was to come as well as the after-images of what was long past.....

The sense of shadowy menace conveyed is superb and so is the imagery, always a strong point with Aldiss. "a nightmare of stone" and so on. I also read "The Saliva Tree" in school and that is just crying out to be made into a movie! It would be awesome to make it in Telugu and set in Krishna/Godavari district at the turn of the century, Sir Arthur Cotton and what have you :-) My suggestion is for you to get hold of a "Best of" anthology of Aldiss' stories and use that as a jumping point. His recent (last 20 years or so) output seems to have suffered so I strongly recommend the 60s and 70s "peak" Aldiss. I also picked up a brand-new copy of "Trillion Year Spree", the influential review of SF that Aldiss co-edited for 40 rupees at some sale ages ago. Its a good, "biased" look at the state of the science-fiction union.

"You're free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order. But we will."

                                                                                 ---George W. Bush,

                                                                                                April 13, 2003

It is generally agreed that the later installments of the Star Wars saga would do well with drastic improvements. Amongst the long catalogue of faults, most critics agree that the wooden dialogue is the worst offender. Here is a simple method of improving the lines by substituting the word "pants".  My favourites:

1. I felt a great disturbance in the pants.
2. Vader - Now I am the Pants. Obi Wan - Only the Pants of evil.
3. The Force is strong in my pants.
4. Chewie and me got into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.
5. Your pants, you will not need them.
6. I cannot teach him. The boy has no pants.
7. You came in those pants? You’re braver than I thought.
8. Governer Tarkin. I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s pants.
9. In his pants you will find a new definition of pain and suffering
10. I think you just can’t bear to let a gorgeous guy like me out of your pants.
11. Pull up! All pants pull up!
12. I sense the conflict within you. Let go of your pants!
13. I’ve just made a deal that will keep the Empire out of our pants forever.
14. Alderan is peaceful, we have no pants!
15. These aren’t the pants you’re looking for
16. I am altering the pants. Pray that I don't alter them any further
17. It's your father's pants. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight.
18. "Slimey? My pants this is." -Yoda
19. "I have pants now! " -Darth Vader
20. "Pants not make one great." -Yoda

The entire list can be found here

Browsing for a bed-time read when at a friends place sometime ago, I came across "Writers at Work", a compilation of interviews conducted by the famous literary journal, "Paris Review" with renowned writers. The book was published sometime in the late 60s I think. I jotted some of the quotable quotes in my diary - gleanings:

Interviewer: What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
Hemingway: Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. Atleast he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

eka_lavya also has a Hemingway quote up.

Interviewer: It has been said that a writer only deals with one or two ideas throughout his work. Would you say your work reflects one or two ideas?
Hemingway: Who said that? It sounds much too simple. The man who said it possibly had only one or two ideas.

Aldous Huxley clears the doors of his perception on James Joyce damning him with faint, left-handed praise.

Interviewer: Were you much taken with Joyce?
Huxley: Never very much - no. I never got very much out of Ulysses. I think it's an extraordinary book, but so much of it consists of rather lengthy demonstrations of how a novel ought not to be written, doesen't it? He does show nearly every conceivable way it should not be written, and then goes on to show how it might be written.

Finally Evelyn Waugh pitches in advice which the book "reviewers" of today would do well to heed.

Waugh: I used to have a rule when I reviewed books as a young man never to give unfavourable notice to a book I hadn't read. I find even this simple rule is flagrantly broken now.

Excerpts from the interviews can be found at the Review's oddly named "DNA of Literature" page. I think their goal is to enable the entire archive to be downloaded free of cost.

There are those who labour for years untold, never succeeding in capturing in paper or stone what they wanted to say. And there are those to whom it comes so effortlessly, in whom the Immortal Fire burns cleanly and evenly. Their works are of deceptive simplicity, the simplicity that is the hardest to achieve.
And it another matter that often the former find the world's fleeting attention and are bestowed its wealth while the latter struggle and perish all in obscurity.

Oblivion
Swells our sails and bears us on...

Clark Ashton Smith, who closed his career working as a manual labourer was one of those burnt by the fire. The "Emperor of Dreams" who had his first collection of poems published when still a teen, died in 1961 at the age of 68. He was working till the end, sculpting in soft rock. At the time of his death, the boy who was once hailed as "Keats of the Pacific" was employed as a woodcutter.

Jump - off imminent. Let the novel writing begin!