Retrospection: One

Welcome Back.

I’ve been gone long. 3 months, near about. 3 months of slack acknowledgment of life’s suckiness. I am hoping for that to change.

A lot of changes took place, yet somehow I am still as indolent as ever. Rains gave into Fall, which gave into Winter. The music playing changed with seasons – Jazz for the rains, Slowcore for the fall, Johnny Hollow (listen on it) and a whole lotta Gothic ambiance for the winters. The lack of good books to read was apparent in much scarce thoughts on the blog. However, I pulled myself up to read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and I find myself completely blown away. I haven’t read a more complex novel. The writing style, I presume, is part reason for the complexity. I also watched Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and it is an amazing adaptation of Heart of Darkness. If you aren’t much into reading books you much watch this classic of a war movie. I am currently trying Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

A lot of pending DVDs found their way to the screen. Apocalypse Now, Chinatown, Dead Poet’s Society, The Dreamers, El Topo, Everything is Illuminated, Fargo, Silent Hill, and some more. Many old DVDs went into a lot of heavy rotation too – Casablanca, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Godfather I & II, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Good Will Hunting, Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, To Kill A Mockingbird, Vanilla Sky and a lot more.

So, all-in-all, I haven’t done much again. It is high time I do something worthwhile.

There’s lot to write about but words aren’t flowing the way they used to. I feel more and more like Winston Smith starting his diary in Nineteen Eighty-Four, wanting to write, afraid to write, but when he writes it seems more like babble than a meaningful discourse yet the babble makes complete sense.

So I’ll leave you guys here hoping that at least one or two of the old readers would return. While I club my notes and thoughts for a serious introspection of the last 3 months, you keep reading and talkback on this routinely mundane post.

PS. Took quite a part of these three months to redesign this blog. Wait and Watch. Work In Progress.

Bookworming!

I picked this up from Shoe Fiend, whose Other Shoes are Manolos (Great Blog. Must Read). Since no one would tag me a meme I started a fuckin’ meme meself. This meme is all about books. I love reading. Just give me something that catches my interest and I’ll devour it once and again. It so happens that writing this meme has allowed me to look upon and review my book choices and the hidden meaning behind it. Yea, this is becoming very mysterious and not much interesting. So we’ll skip the mysteries.

01. What is the total number of books you've owned?

• 150-200

02. What are the last books you bought?

• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  Simple and Beautiful. I’ve been looking for it since I saw the movie. I searched everywhere, found just one last copy.


• Lost World by Michael Crichton
  A better sequel to Jurassic Park plus it came real cheap for a Hardback, Rs.50.

03. What is the last book you've read?

• Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
  Some people ought to accept that Harry Potter is not just for kids. Half Blood Prince is perhaps the best written Harry Potter book till date.


• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  What can I say; I am inarticulate in describing the beauty of this book.

04. What are you currently reading?

• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
  Tyler Durden. Anarchy. Insomnia. Support Groups. IKEA-Nesting Instinct. BLISS!
  

05. What are the 5 books that have meant a lot to you or that you particularly enjoyed?

• Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer
  A taut and brutally told Rites of Passage story. Growing up in 1950s Idaho. Surreal. The writing is beautiful, wound tight.
  


• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  See the same in #03.


• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  The most rich and most beautiful adventure/fantasy ever written.


• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
  Magic and Fantasy as never before.


• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
  War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
  


• Awaydays by Kevin Sampson
  Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch on Steroids. Yes, I need an extra.
  

06. What are the 5 book characters that have meant a lot to you or that you particularly enjoyed or relate to?

• Atticus Finch (To Kill A Mockingbird)
  I want to be Atticus Finch when I grow up. :D


• Tyler Durden (Fight Club)
  The one from the Dark side.
  


• Michael Corleone (The Godfather)
  My favorite Sicilian.


• Frodo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings)
  The hobbit who became an elf.
  


• Jake Weber (Faraway Places)
  I want to perceive life like Jake Weber. Everything is an Illusion. Haji Baba and Geronimo. Read the book to know what I am talking about.
  


• Hari and Ryan (Five Point Someone)
  I am kind of like Hari. I want to be Ryan.

07. What book(s) caught your attention but you never had a chance to read?

• All by Chuck Palahniuk, Tom Spanbauer, Amy Hempel, Hunter S. Thompson (Gonzo)
  


• Some by William Shakespeare, Somerset Maugham


• Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
  Elder days. Morgoth. Beren and Luthien. Beautiful.


• American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
  Even a great movie can't justify a book.


• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
  The book most personal and close to the author. Weird story, drug abuse - I love that in a book.

08. What book(s) that you've owned for so long but never read?

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  I just can't read lenghty sentences. Give me some clipped sentences and choruses.
  


• Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
  Pinkie, ahem! No can do.
  


• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
  Blade Runner. Got it for Rs.20. Surreal. Trying.
  

09. Favorite Reading Spots?

• Bed/Lying down anywhere
• Café (Black coffee and books, just perfect)

10. 5 favorite authors?

• Tom Spanbauer
• Chuck Palahniuk
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Harper Lee
• George Orwell

So there it is. Passion is in the details, people. Pushing this meme to Arshiya. Write some, sista.

Random Thoughts Vol.2

Reasons are the same as before. Hence: Random Thoughts Vol.2

• Mission Impossible 3 finally arrived in Hyderabad. Saw it releasing day - Friday. Awesome action. J.J. Abrams has made it to my list of great action directors. Tom Cruise, always brilliant. Hoffman came out as a great villain. The slight suspense was no surprise, already knew who was behind it before the intermission. Maggie Q - HOT. I was looking forward to see Billy 'Russel Hammond' Crudup after quite a long time in a huge movie. He was great too. A great movie. No bad things to say except the lack of THE THEME in the movie most of the time. But still, the music was good. The Vatican and Shanghai sequences were brilliantly shot. Will watch again this week.



• Been reading Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird. A geniune story of innocence and human dignity. Looks like I finally found the life-changing-book after all. Will write all about it in a post quite soon. Started reading it for the second time. This stuff should be in primary education curriculum.
  



• Kal El will return on June 30th in IMAX 3D. Book your tickets, I'm booking mine as soon as advance starts. There will be 20 minutes of 3D Supes. Can't wait. The reviews are good not excellent though. Some say it is more of a Chick movie. Some say Spacey wasn't used much. I say fuck off! I say, "I HEART SUPERMAN".



• Listening to James Blunt's Back to Bedlam. Listen. Wallow in the beautiful melancholy. Also playing all live performances by Pearl Jam. Also in the loop are the Verve, Soundgarden, Fort Minor, Lynyrd fuckin' Skynyrd, Helen Stellar, My Morning Jacket.



• Also playing Counter Strike and Condition Zero. Trying to throw a LAN party at Copy Junction, Banjara Hills. Need more friends/players.

Till Death Do Us Part

Ever read Chuck Palahniuk?

I guess not.

Read this.

Intelligent Suffering

Oh, is it not but intelligent suffering when you read Edgar Allan Poe with despair and melancholia? Is it not love, when you suffer at the words of Maupassant or Kafka, out of willingness and anxiety?

I have, in my early reading years, read through many an insomniac nights the works of Poe and Maupassant. These are two great authors who share more than their genres – the art of weaving a tale of morbid fear, gloom and hopelessness around everyday life. Edgar Allan Poe, I would later find was sort of an inspiration for Guy De Maupassant.

There is a kind of an enigma that surrounds tales of a darker nature. For me it is one “genus” that is most close to our hearts, most human. But dark for one is not exactly dark for others. Simply saying, dark is not a genre in itself. It is evident, not by saying, but by reading something that would seem dark to you. I’ve read those fat plot-driven novels, stories taken from the pages of the daily newspapers. I read the Da Vinci Code, I was ecstatic (until I read other books by Dan Brown). I read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, I was clueless. And these are best sellers by best selling authors. Not one of the many books I’ve read had any effect on me. Alternatively, I read a short story by Maupassant. A story which has neither a plot nor a shred of reason. A story about a well-to-do French man who wanders around Paris one night and ends up starved to death. By the end I felt as if I had gone through that deadly ordeal myself. It was so powerful that I kept reading it again and again, till I lost the book, and lost the name of the story in my memory. I still don’t remember the title, yet I consider it as my favorite Maupassant story ever.

The thing about dark tales is they are, in essence, sad and emotional. Because in the end you aren’t afraid, you are just sad. But people don’t want to feel that emotion. I look around book stores; I look at people buying books. Everyone wants a book that makes them feel happy. Ah! They so love their happy endings. Even when people go “over the edge” they buy a sappy book, books loosely written to induce emotions that are not true to the soul of both the writer and reader. People are “afraid” to read books that feel true. So, they indulge in best sellers. I do too. If I ever get to lay my hands on the darkest of tales, I would never read the best sellers. But alas, is all I can say.

Books these days are full of cheesy plots and character-less characters that do not dwell in my after-thoughts. I mean, when was the last time I thought why Robert Langdon did what he did or why were there so many goddamn characters in State of Fear. The characters of these best sellers are just characters. What they lack is the humanness, the soul that exists in every character of a dark tale, be it French men, Princes, Hobbits, Wizards or humanoid mask-wearing villain who makes breathing sounds. And each of these characters, no matter how far from being human, is truly human.

When you read The Masque of Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe you can’t help but feel the movement of the story. The description, which goes from flamboyant to the darkest red, is simple and stark. The story is roughly a narrative description of a Prince’s party while the outside world rages through a plague. By the end of the short story you are as horrified as the Prince himself. Only Poe can make horror out of a series of rooms.

I love it when it ends like this. I am no sadist or pessimist. I am just more human than human. More sensitive to emotions those are rare and sad. And I suffer out of my will, out of my intelligence. I enjoy this suffering, this feeling of despair and eventual sadness. I enjoy them in my books, in movies, music, games, and in writing. I wish every passing day, I wish I could write such tales but I digress or am afraid. Of suffering what these men have suffered to flow words that are an intelligent suffering to the rest of us.

Franz Kafka once wrote, in a letter to his friend, Oskar Pollak

“I believe one should read only the books that bite and sting. If a book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a punch on the head, what are we reading it for? … We need the books which affect us like a disaster, which pain us deeply, like the death of someone dearer to us than ourselves, like being lost in the woods, far from everyone, like a suicide…”

Quoting Authors Vol.3

"The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how [to] free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times [I'd] rather be torn to pieces than rather it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me." - Franz Kafka

Quoting Authors Vol. 2

Big Brother is watching you. - George Orwell

Quoting Authors Vol. 1

“What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.” - Chuck Palahniuk

Animal Farm

And I discovered George Orwell. I read 1984. I read it like, 1984 times. And I looked up Amazon for his complete bibliography and I decided to buy anything "Orwell" the next time I go to a bookstore.

And whoosh!

The George Orwell books I used to see in every bookstore and every roadside stall vanished. It's like when I want a book all people want that book. It always happens. Always with my current favorite. So as I boarded my train to Chennai, and Lo Behold. Higginbotham's! Official bookseller on the Indian railway stations. I left my compartment and went over to the mobile stall. And right there among magazines, Indian comics, Telugu novels, cheap erotic thrillers, newspapers and other English novels.

Animal Farm.

The book is pure Orwell-ish satire. The whole animalism metaphor is so perfectly done that you can't help but see the whole communist idealism behind it. I read the short yet powerful fairy story all the way to Chennai. After reading 1984 again and again I've already got a nice idea of how Orwell's satires work. Animal Farm showed a lot of similarity with 1984. From its base of Socialism/Communism to its characters.

Animal Farm seemed to me like a prequel to 1984. Its basic ideology was similar to 1984 that is Socialism/Communism. The characters of the Manor Farm have much akin to those of 1984. To begin the pigs, I felt, changed to the PARTY in 1984. The pig, Snowball, turned into Goldstein the traitor. The pig, Napoleon turned into Big Brother.

The best part of the book was the last. At half-past the book I knew what the end would be. But still the part where all the farm animals see the pigs walking on two legs was really apprehensive. And the end was even better.

George Orwell has described Animal Farm as a Fairy Story. And certainly it is like a fairy story, but the mixed metaphor is hard to leave out of your mind. The representation of the revolution of the workers against their master is not a part of fiction. It is but true that the origins of a similar revolution always were and will always be the same as in this satirical writing. Yea sure this is a fairy story. But this little fairy tale has turned on to truth once before and will do so indefinitely.

Choke Yourself!

I love Chuck Palahniuk's work, although I've only read Fight Club and a few other online write ups. He, i believe, is the Quentin Tarantino of writing. So, anyway, the news/rumor that is making rounds these days is that Chuck Palahniuk's CHOKE is being made into a movie. The scoop came up at AICN, the scooper seems to have heard about the movie from Chuck himself while interviewing him. But i guess we have to wait for something from the film makers themselves. The team behind the hellblazer movie, Constantine are supposed to be hooked with Susan Sarandon as the mother of Victor Mancini, the lead character. As for Victor Mancini himself, Oscar-Nominee, Heath Ledger and Ryan Gosling are hoping to star.

Choke is the story of med-school dropout Victor Mancini, an anti-hero of our deranged times. He is a con artist who works in a colonial-era theme park by the day, visits his addled mother, and frequents "sexual addiction recovery" workshops to pick up dates. His scam, is to choke on his food in upscale restaurants and then allowing himself to be "saved" by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell is ... well, George Orwell. The man writes so well you can't help but admire the prose cos it flows like poetry. He hits each and every sentence with such weight that you are left with no option but to re-visit his books over again. Published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four is so fuckin' futuristic that, for once, "relevant in these days too" seems quite true. Rarely have I read a book that is so damn close yet so far. Reading about doublethink and big brother you almost always think this stuff can be so future. Whenever I re-read 1984, each and every time, I feel that Winston will win his war. And each and every time he wins, but it's not his war. And each and every time I contemplate if this can be our future.

Now as I wait for V for Vendetta, its hitting screens (including IMAX) on 17th March, I go through many movies that show a demoralized, depressive and pessimistic vision of the future. Dark City, Equilibrium and many more like them seem to pick much of their future from George Orwell's mindfuck satire. I don't know if mindfuck typifies 1984 but that is how it always leaves me. Mind Fucked.