Go click the link, pleeze

Ron Mueck



If this image intrigues you, please visit this link, via the Washington Post, to see a selection of work by the Australian sculptor RON MUECK

I remember seeing three of his pieces at the New York show of the Saatchi collection called SENSATION -- and they were creepy/amazing. These current images are equally creepy/amazing -- it's especially weird to see the pieces with spectators moving around the figures -- I would love to see the actual pieces.

GOOD WIFEKEEPING

GoodHouseKeeping, 1955

This came to me via Anvar Alikhan, who gets my prize for being the single most productive source of e-messages that I can post to this blog!

I hope the text of this priceless 1955 Good Housekeeping article is legible -- actually, I've just glanced at the page and realize that it ISN'T, but if you click on the picture, it'll load at full-size in its own window. It is truly a gem. A guide to all of us ...

THRILLZ, VARIOUS

Well, yesterday it finally happened: I outed myself as an actual physical presence by attending a social event. I spent the entire day cursing myself for having accepted an invitation to meet Paul Theroux at a dinner hosted by Larry and Ellen Schwartz at their Amrita Shergill Marg residence. But at the end of the evening, mercifully short, I had to confess (when asked) that I'd had fun. The author was pleasantly approachable -- and in my brief interaction with him, showed me a tattoo on his right hand that (he said) was an example of his own artwork. It was a simple symmetrical mark, rather like a logo design, which looked like a combination of bird-in-flight and cross-bow. About an inch long. Interesting.

This is my fourth or fifth recent public appearance and I am starting to feel it's time to get back into my shell coz otherwise it could get to be a habit. On Friday the 15th I officiated at the launch event for Amruta Patil's KARI and that was fun too. However, as I realized long ago, the trick to ensuring that one gets pleasure out of doing things like this is to do them VERY RARELY. It takes only two or three sightings to become a fixture and then a bore. Currently, it is still odd enough for me to be present in a crowd of well-dressed people that the few others who recognize me say "Oi! What are YOU doing here?" instead of "Gahhh. You again ..."

Meanwhile, on the recent-reading front, I have just finished an extraordinary book: THE ART OF MURDER by Jose Carlos Somoza. Yes, it's a murder mystery and I don't generally make a big deal about genre books. But this one is different. VERY different. The murder(s) are practically incidental to the main motif of the story which concerns itself with a new trend in art, call HYPERDRAMATISM. It involves the use of living models, many of them female and most of them nude, as the actual artworks. This means that the models must be painstakingly trained to pose for several hours at a time to remain perfectly still, including all kinds of drugs and chemicals to ensure e.g. that they do not need to evacuate their unmentionables or dribble, that their eyes will not stream with tears or need to be blinked. The models are referred to as "canvases" and from the time that they are contracted for a work, they are regarded as objects, rather than people. An extension of this art form is the design and creation of various subsets of art, such as furniture: live models used as tables, chairs, trolleys ...

When the first of these beautiful young oddities is murdered, one of the puzzles that presents itself immediately is: was this some form of Art? Was it an extension of the original work in which the model had been posed, or was it a despicable act of destruction, in which a young girl had been murdered?

The author is Spanish so the book is a translation. I feel sure, without any persuasive argument to back me up, that a Brit or American author could not have carried this theme to its logical conclusion, because the moral/ethical issues would have caused the narrative to break down. It required that special European sensibility -- a highly sophisticated artistic vision -- to make it convincing. Run out and order it at once ...

On The Road With Comix!

... so yes, I've been away AGAIN. Frankly, the past few weeks have felt a bit like a road movie -- just as soon as I arrive somewhere, I'm already organizing my getaway. I got back from Madras on the 4th of this month and left two days later for Bom-Bom-Bom-Bom.

This was a purpose driven trip -- the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival asked if I would be willing to come and to their immense surprise, I agreed. I was grinning (on the phone) as I told them WHY: because I wanted to go to Bombay anyway. It's been too long since I met a number of my friends there and I thought "Okay! Time to go!!" -- needless to say, getting a free ticket is a wonderful resolver of doubts.

In order to justify the expense to themselves, the KGAF asked me to sit on two panels. One was on Banned Books (BB), moderated by Jai Arjun Singh and the other was on Graphic Story Telling (GST) moderated by moi. I reached Bom on the night of the 7th -- it was kind of late and I had a brief panic attack when I looked around the arrival lobby -- nothing was even remotely recognizable. But then I stepped out to where the cabs were milling around and recognized the vaguely saucer-shaped outline of the Centaur Hotel -- it's being renovated and currently looks like a prop-in-waiting for Close Encounters III -- and calmed down. Took a cab to my cousin's house in Peddar Road, and flew through a largely alien landscape because it appeared to be entirely elevated (i.e., on the backs of various flyovers new to me) but the moment we touched down at Haji Ali recognition slipped back into gear and five minutes later I was stepping into my cousin's lovely old-style apartment on Carmichael Road.

This isn't going to be a detailed account because there's just not enough time to do all that and also manage to keep pace with my CURRENT life but very quickly -- I had a FUN TIME. It was especially great to catch up with my cousin. She is not merely that rarest of beings, a doctor who truly enjoys being a compassionate healer but is also the kind of reader who makes writers feel that the struggle of writing books is worth it after all. AND she's passionately interested in art, is a gifted artist herself ... Need I say more? A wonderful person to spend time with.

I had two separate stays in Bombay: four days in the south with my cousin, the KGAF and Kiran Nagarkar followed by two days in the north with my dearest of friends, G and J (okay, so THEY know who they are!) plus a Michelin-grade dinner at my nephew's Bandra apartment.

Speeding along: I would guess that my fellow-panellists on the BB evening have already blogged their accounts of the event -- Amit Varma and Devangshu Datta and Chandrahas Choudhury being the remaining three of the five of us -- so I am going to skip straight across to the GST event. I hadn't met any of the four members of my panel -- Orijit Sen, Samit Basu, Sarnath Banerjee and Amruta Patil (any misspellings will be dealt with later, sorry! Can't stop now) -- though of course I knew of them and had exchanged e-mail messages with them in the course of the ten days leading up to KGAF. But we did manage to get a little time together before the event and Amruta was good enough to spend a lot of time digging up images of some of the leading (international) graphic titles to use as a brief introductory presentation during the discussion. I'm going to post the list of favourite titles I extracted from the other panellists here today -- but I'm not going to say whose choices they are because maybe that's not entirely relevant. I will eventually include the images that Amruta researched for the event, plus links. For now, here's the list, presented in the order I received them:

LIST 01*
The Sandman (by Neil Gaiman).
The Watchmen (Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons)
Lucifer (by Mike Carey).
Kingdom Come (by Mark Waid).
Y The Last Man (by Brian K. Vaughan).
Buddha (by Osamu Tezuka).
V For Vendetta (by Alan Moore).
Pride of Baghdad (by Brian K. Vaughan).
Empire (by Mark Waid).
Transmetropolitan (by Warren Ellis).
Superman: Birth Right (by Mark Waid).
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (by Frank Miller).
Batman: Year One (by Frank Miller).
Maus (by Art Spiegelman).
300 (by Frank Miller).
The New Adventures of Hitler (Grant Morrison).
Tim Hunter: Books of Magic (by Neil Gaiman).
War Story (by Garth Ennis).
Ocean (by Warren Ellis).
The Interman (by Jeff Parker).
Chronicles of Wormwood (by Garth Ennis).

LIST 02
1) Paul Hornschemeier's 'Mother Come Home'
2) Alison Bechdel 'Fun Home'
3) Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman's 'The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mister Punch'
4) Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman's 'The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish'
5) Craig Thompson's 'Blankets'
6) Guy Delisle's 'Pyongyang'
7) Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie's 'Aya'
8) Frank Miller's '300'
9) Adrian Tomine 'Summer Blonde'
10) Charles Burns 'Black Hole'
11) Joann Sfar's 'The Rabbi's Cat'
12) Joann Sfar's 'Vampire Loves'
13) Miriam Ratin's 'We are on our Own'
14) 'Safe Area Gorazde' by Joe Sacco
15) Marjane Satrapi's 'Persepolis' 1 and 2
16) Brian Vaughn and Niko Henrichnon's 'Pride of Baghdad'
17) Cris Ware ' Jimmy Corrigan - Smartest Kid on the planet'

LIST 03
FLOOD - Eric Drooker - USA
THE DEATH OF SPEEDY - Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez -
Mexico
NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND - Hayao Miyazaki -
Japan
THE RABBI'S CAT - Joann Sfar - France
MAUS - Art Speigelman - USA
EXIT WOUNDS - Rutu Modan, Israel
SAFE AREA GORAZDE - Joe Sacco, USA
BERLIN: CITY OF STONES - Jason Lutes, Germany
DAVID BORING - Daniel Clowes, USA
KAMPUNG BOY - Lat, Malaysia
BLOOM COUNTY BABYLON - Berke Brethed, USA
MY MOST SECRET DESIRE - Julie Doucet, Canada
CLASS WAR COMIX - Ciff Harper, Britain
BROUILLARD AU PONT DE TOLBIAC - Jacques Tardi and Leo
Malet, France
BAREFOOT GEN - Keiji Nakazawa, Japan
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS - Raymond Briggs, Britain
CALVIN AND HOBBES Series - Bill Watterson, USA
TINTIN Series- Herge, Belgium
ZAP, WEIRDO and other series - Robert Crumb, USA
PHANTOM Series - Lee Falk, USA
EARLY TITLES - Amar Chitra Katha, India

LIST 04
The Authority, we3 and Nextwave by Warren Ellis
Welcome to Tranquility by Gail Simone
Preacher, Hitman, The Boys by Garth Ennis
Lost Girls, Swamp Thing, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore
Fables by Bill Willingham
The Invisibles, Animal Man by Grant Morrison
Kingdom Come by Mark Waid
Astro City by Kurt Busiek

Titles that were disappointing:
ARKHAM ASYLUM - Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, USA
SKIN DEEP - Charles Burns, USA
GREETINGS FROM HELLVILLE - Thomas Ott, Switzerland
SIN CITY - Frank Miller, USA
NOTES FROM A DEFEATIST - Joe Sacco, USA
PYONGYANG - Guy Delisle, France
DR. FAUSTUS - Oscar Zarate, Argentina
RECENT TITLES - Virgin Comics, India
BUDDHA - Osamu Tezuka, Japan
SANDMAN - Neil Gaiman. Britain

--------------
I've only got just enough time to make a special mention here about a young man I was introduced to (electronically, i.e.) by K.D.Singh of The Bookshop in Jorbagh -- his name is Gaurav Panday and he is an extremely avid reader and keen collector of graphic novels. I mention him because it seems to me that he represents the Ideal Reader (for GST, anyway): fanatically loyal to his favourite authors/artists, but also very interested in augmenting his awareness and expanding his horizons.

*-- I haven't made MY list of faves (yet!) but of course there are a few titles here that would be on my list. Similarly with the list of "disappointments": they represent the choices made by one of the respondents. Incidentally, I asked each of the panellists (and also G. Panday) for 20 faves as well as a list of fave-hates (didn't specify a number, however) but only one person offered the second list.

Okay, I've GOT to stop. More, much more, later.

Cellular Weirdness

A friend gave me her SAMSUNG cellphone recently -- yes, some of us have friends like that! -- and as I struggle to adapt my poor, Sudoku-challenged brain to the vast gulf that separates a NOKIA from a SAMSUNG (for instance: the space-bar key is NOT the "0" but the "#". I've had it for five days now, and I STILL hit the wrong button all the time!) I've noticed a very odd feature: the phone seems to be travelling in an alternative universe. While I remain stationary in the house -- did I mention anywhere that I am currently in Madras? Visiting my Mum -- which should register under the location "CHETPET" in the phone, the phone manages to travel as far afield as MCNICHOLS ROAD and NUNGUMBAKKAM. Each time it travels it gives out a little buzz and does a jig on whatever surface it happens to be resting upon and a crescent-shaped alert-light goes on, on the front of the phone.

I forgot to ask my friend to tell me everything I needed to know about the phone, so there are lots of features that leave me puzzled and worried. Needless to say, I do not have a manual. It's a bit like walking blindfold through an unfamiliar house (we all do this periodically, don't we?? Ummm .. DON'T we???) -- I keep on bumping into stuff that seems familiar and then again ... isn't. Still. Now there's no going back to my previous phone, coz I have unaccountably managed to fry it. I mean, I wasn't TRYING to fry it, but I did insert a TATA Indicom SIM card into it, thinking that it would work just as well inside a NOKIA as it would (presumably) inside a TATA Indicom phone (which I don't have. Long story. Don't ask). WRONGGGGG! The NOKIA can neither find its own network now nor, it turns out, can it turn itself back on when I insert its original SIM into it (i.e., the one that's currently in the newly acquired SAMSUNG). Not only that, but it is displaying Japanese characters when it's got its original SIM inside it. Very disturbing. Fortunately, its internal list of numbers (i.e., the ones that were not saved to the SIM) are still accessible, so I can copy them (by HAND, what a thrill) into the SAMSUNG.

And so it goes! The joys of connectedness.

A New Year Gained, A Marble Lost ...

Yup. It's the fourteenth day of this new year and yet this is my FIRST POST. Ah well. So be it! We're slowing down in the blogging department, THAT'S for sure. But it's not been a bad year so far. Two weeks in. Hmm. We cross our fingers. We hope.

As for marbles lost, well ... a very weird thing began to happen, maybe two months ago. Quite suddenly I found, I simply could NOT complete the daily Sudoku in the newspaper. I get the Asian Age and it publishes two Sudoku puzzles every day, including Sundays. Quite generous of them! But whereas I used to be able to do both every day, I began to find that (a) I was starting to make fatal errors, resulting in unfinished puzzles and then (b) I stopped being able to do the harder of the two puzzles at all. I mean ... totally.

What does it mean? I feel very sure that it's not just chance or some change in the puzzle-format. I used to be able to do them and now, when I glance at the puzzle, I get nothing -- oh maybe one or two numbers to fill in, but that's all. And I used to be able to do the whole puzzle. I've never liked struggling with puzzles so either I did them fairly easily or I didn't bother. But this, now, is just complete blankness. I can even recall what it felt like -- a type of light melody, a note here, a note there and gradually the whole tune would fill up and the thing would make sense and all the bits would fall into place. For the harder puzzles, yes, I used to pencil in a few "candidates" then cross them off as other numbers found their niches.

So is this the beginning of the end? Should I make the effort of going to a neurologist to confirm that old Mr Al Z. Heimers has become a permanent lodger in my poor brain? I don't know whether I want to find out! Yes, I can still do the easy ones -- but I find them irritating, like nursery rhymes rather than a full-bodied tune. I hate acknowledging that this is ALL I can manage now, when just a couple of months ago, I was pretty confident I could get to the end of any puzzle I began. Still, I keep doing the easy ones, just so that I don't forget altogether. Every day I wonder when I am going to find that these are also beyond me!

It's an odd feeling. Like seeing myself fall off a cliff, in slow motion. Why is it a surprise? I'm 54 now and will turn 55 in June this year. So it's not as if the grey in my hair is just an illusion. There have been other marbles lost over the years, things I used to be able to do which I can't any more. When I was a pre-teen, I could write reams of doggerel, for instance -- but by the time I was twenty-five, I realized quite suddenly that I could no longer do it. It was like reaching into a cupboard for a jar of cookies that was normally always full, only to find that the jar had mysteriously disintegrated, vanished, ceased to be. I used to have a gigantic vocabulary but now, if I can find words of three syllables that reasonably express what I want to say, I feel grateful.

Weird, huh?

There's not much point feeling especially sad about it. There are millions of things I can't do -- have never been able to do -- and now there are a few more. Big deal. I'm concentrating on feeling grateful for the things I can still do. It's not much, and it's not a long list (it's never been!) but at least I still laugh a lot and I don't sweat the small stuff. I'm still drawing and writing. Still blogging and e-mailing. Talking to my Mum on the telephone every evening and hey -- I still like icecream!!

What a great gift to humankind icecream is! Yum. In answer to that question that used to be asked -- If you knew your world was going to end in 15 minutes (oh -- five, three, ten -- what matter? You get the point -- nuclear strike about to happen, the warning comes only moments before the end) what would you do in the brief time left to you? -- I've always answered, ICE CREAM!!!

*grin* And you? If you had 3/5/10/15 minutes left ... what would you do before the lights went out forever?

An EMBUGGERANCE...

Tha wonderful word belongs to author TERRY PRATCHETT, not to me. And he coined it on account of being given this bit of bad news by his doctors.

Go read. Just another sign (in case you ever doubted it) that life in this vale of sorrows is DEEPLY unfair!

Alzheimer's Test

It's been so long since I posted to my blog that I had to re-start with something ... unusual. So here's something I received from my friend Viji, by e-mail:

Alzheimer's Text
The following was developed as a mental age assessment by the School Psychiatry at Harvard University . Take your time and see if you can read each line aloud without a mistake. The average person over 40 years of age cannot do it!
1. This is this cat.
2. This is is cat.
3. This is how cat.
4. This is to cat.
5. This is keep cat.
6. This is an cat.
7. This is old cat.
8. This is fart cat.
9. This is busy cat.
10 This is for cat.
11. This is forty cat.
12. This is seconds cat.

Now go back and read the third word in each line from the top down and I betcha' you cannot resist passing it on.

ICE stands for IN CASE of EMERGENCY

I've been away for about 10 days and have lots of interesting stuff to report BUT ... before I do that, I'd like to share this information about an initiative that might save lives if acted upon by all CELL PHONE USERS:

ICE Campaign - "In Case of Emergency"

We all carry our mobile phones with names & numbers stored in its memory but nobody,
other than ourselves, knows which of these numbers belong to our closest family or friends.

If we were to be involved in an accident or were taken ill, the people attending us would have our mobile phone but wouldn't know who to call. Yes, there are hundreds of numbers stored but which one is the contact person in case of an emergency?

Hence this "ICE" (In Case of Emergency) Campaign ..

The concept of "ICE" is catching on quickly. It is a method of contact during emergency situations. As cell phones are carried by the majority of the population, all you need to do is store the number of a contact person or persons who should be contacted during emergency under the name "ICE" ( In Case Of Emergency).

The idea was thought up by a paramedic who found that when he went to the scenes of accidents, there were always mobile phones with patients, but theydidn't know which number to call. He therefore thought that it would be a good idea if there was a nationally recognized name for this purpose.

In an emergency situation, Emergency Service personnel and hospital Staff would be able to quickly contact the right person by simply dialing the number you have stored as "ICE."

For more than one contact name simply enter ICE1, ICE2 and ICE3 etc. A great idea that will make a difference!

Let's spread the concept of ICE by storing an ICE number in our Mobile phones today!=

Please forward this to all yr friends and nears.. It won't take too many "forwards" before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life, or put a loved one's mind at rest ICE will speak for you when you are not able to. This is released by WHO for the benefit of mankind....


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

... and onward, onward

Yesterday, I got a Diwali gift of such surpassing ugliness that I was quite impressed. It takes real talent to produce something so extremely horrid that it has no redeeming qualities WHATSOEVER. It got me thinking about what it means to give gifts that aren't meant to be taken seriously ... and whether we should all rise up and do something about all that wasted expenditure ... and what I should do to stem the rot. But then when I got to thinking about all the other causes and crises that exist in the world ... well ... it seemed kind of ridiculous to get carried away about just another Diwali gift. So I removed some of the more fruity descriptions I had posted here about the thing and have stowed the object out of sight.

Meanwhile, my travel agent (I'll post a link to his company web-site some day soon -- he's become a buddy over the years quite aside from being possibly the friendliest person ever to survive in his line of business!) sent me a kilo of fresh tasty almonds (unsalted) in a pressed-glass bowl that looks as if its designers put some effort into making a pleasing, durable object. It makes the point about the holiday season in the right way. Can't go wrong with almonds!

And for those who like to combine their word-game-playing skills with a spot of good-samaritanism, here's a useful link: Free Rice. Fill that bowl! You'll enjoy it -- and maybe someone else will too.

prepare to bleed

Click here.

Nalini Jameela

The first time I heard about Nalini Jameela was perhaps a year ago, in a newspaper article. There was a photograph of her -- she has a pleasant face, not a young woman's face, but pleasant, thoughtful and somehow questing. Maybe the tilt of her head, the gaze directed upwards was deliberately posed to give that impression.

But what caught my attention and caused me to clip the item out of the paper -- NOT something I do often -- was that she is a sex-worker, living and working in Kerala, who had written her autobiography and got it published.

Now her autobiography, originally in malayalam has been re-published in English, by by Madras-based WESTLAND(I'll post a link here when/if I find one). I picked up copies at my friend (and Westland editor) Nilanjana Roy's home and speed-read my way through the book last night. It's not long -- 143 pages -- and its translation doesn't feel right -- but I would say it makes complusory reading.

It is, in many ways a shocking book -- NOT because of what it says about the life of a sex-worker but for what it reveals about the lives of so-called "ordinary" Indians. Jameela's story is one of extraordinary resilience -- but how can I use this word "extraordinary" without qualifying it? Alongside her story, like the bystanders whose faces enter the frames of photographs of filmstars posing in public places, are all the others with whom she interacts. They are all equally resilient, long-suffering and strong -- surely as extraordinary, if measured against the yardstick of the lives we read about in novels or learn about through movies. Against the backdrop of Jameela's account, however, "ordinary" and "extraordinary" cease to have much meaning -- she shows us that the huge majority of "ordinary" people have "extraordinary" experiences, in which case they are no longer extraordinary in the sense of unusual, but merely the norm -- the norm that is never acknowledged on its own terms, the norm that is pixelled out of the record by the "India Shining" mythologizers.

Jameela's life and the lives of the huge majority of those amongst whom she lives -- not just sex-workers, but the tradesmen, the rickshawallas, the policemen, the small hoteliers -- are marked by unrelenting insecurity, hampered by such extremes of heartlessness that it is really difficult to understand how they can bear to face up to their realities -- yet the very fact that they do, is a clear indication that it is I who am mistaken, as I judge these lives against the smug certitudes of my own (and of others like me).

The malayalam edition of her book was snapped up -- 13,000 copies were sold in the first 100 days, according to the introduction of this book. It is not a salacious book -- no-one reading it, I believe, is likely to get any cheap thrills from it. To some extent, I miss the spice that has been (I think deliberately) left out. Then again, I can see that a book like this needs to be super-decorous in its appearance and the language of its presentation, in order to avoid being driven underground by its subject-matter. How ironic that less provocative books -- lacy fictions built on middle-aged fantasies -- are decked out like scarlet ladies, while this one, about and by a scarlet lady, looks as meek and saintly as a vegetarian recipe book!

My Phone Line's Down

-- and it's been down for 4 days already. The word is that the cable's been "stolen" from right outside the MTNL centre -- not quite sure what type of enterprising thieves actually dig up telephone cables in order to steal them -- but anyway. That's the reason for various levels of silence in recent days ...
[posted from Nilroy's home]

Paul Theroux's THE ELEPHANTA SUITE

Apparently, in my review in OUTLOOK MAGAZINE of THE ELEPHANTA SUITE I managed to suggest that I didn't like the book. I'm not sure why this this happens -- this isn't the first time -- maybe because I prefer to use up my 300 words giving a reader a sense of what the book's about rather than how much I liked or disliked it.

Anyway -- just in case it isn't clear -- I DID like the book. Quite a bit. I've already bought my first give-away copy and plan several more and my house copy is "travelling".

The three long short stories ("novellas"? Am never very sure when a short story becomes a novella. I would call these short stories) that make up the book certainly aren't cute and cuddly. Each story involves American characters interacting with Indians, in India. Neither culture is presented with its best foot forward. The overwhelming characteristic that comes through is greed -- interlocking neatly in some ways, and then, disastrously NOT.

What I always like about Theroux's prose is the clinical precision of his observations. He uses his characters like the subjects of a dissection, aimed at exposing one or two obscure glands, while he describes the ethos that surrounds the operation with a casual, throwaway flair. Ultimately, however, the "story" is secondary to the descriptions.

The picturesque India of tourist brochures is almost wholly obscured behind the maelstrom of crowds/dirt/beggars that assaults the senses of visitors from quieter, cooler climes. Many Indians regard this view of India as false and "colonial" (the epithet that Indian reviewers hurl at any foreign author who is less than enchanted by the subcontinent). I would call it "unsentimental" rather than colonial. Theroux's is the ultimate unsentimental gaze -- he reports on emotions without drowning in them -- and I thank him for his cool detachment.

Go on -- buy the book -- read it -- and pass it on. Especially to anyone planning a trip in this direction ...

HOME REMEDIES FOR DARWIN AWARD WINNERS*

An amusement sent to me by my niece M!
AMAZINGLY SIMPLE HOME REMEDIES (don't try any of these
at home)

1. If you are choking on an ice cube, don't panic.
Simply pour a cup of boiling water down your throat
and presto. The blockage will be almost instantly
removed.

2. Clumsy? Avoid cutting yourself while slicing
vegetables by getting someone else to hold them while
you chop away.

3. Avoid arguments with your partner about lifting the
toilet seat by simply using the sink.

4. For high blood pressure sufferers: simply cut
yourself and bleed for a few minutes, thus reducing
the pressure in your veins. Remember to use a timer.

5. A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock,
will prevent you from rolling over and going back to
sleep after you hit the snooze button.

6. If you have a bad cough, take a large dose of
laxatives. Then you will be afraid to cough.

7. Have a bad toothache? Smash your thumb with a
hammer and you will forget about the toothache.

8. Sometimes, we just need to remember what the rules
of life really are: You only need two tools: WD-40 and
Duct Tape. If it doesn't move and should, use the
WD-40. If it shouldn't move and does, use the duct
tape.

9. Remember: Everyone seems normal until you get to
know them.

10. Never pass up an opportunity to go to the
bathroom.

11. If you woke up breathing, congratulations! You get
another chance.

12. And finally, be really nice to your family and
friends; you never know when you might need them to
empty your bedpan.

*Don't know what the DARWIN AWARDS are? Prepare to grin ...

BRAIN STRAINERS # 348: CONSTRAINED WRITING

From the incomparable Anvar Alikhan comes this nugget of information:

Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. For example:

Gadsby is an English-language novel consisting of 50,000 words, none of which contain the letter “e.”
The 2004 French novel Le Train de Nulle Part (The Train from Nowhere) by Michel Thaler was written entirely without verbs.
Cadaeic Cadenza is a short story by Mike Keith that uses the digits of pi as the length of words.
Never Again is a novel by Doug Nufer in which no word is used more than once.
Alphabetical Africa is a book by Walter Abish in which the first chapter only uses words that begin with the letter "a," while the second chapter incorporates the letter "b," and then "c," etc. Once the alphabet is finished, Abish takes letters away, one at a time, until the last chapter, leaving only words that begin with the letter "a."
Mary Godolphin produced versions of Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe Words of One Syllable.
One famous example from the Chinese language is The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den which consists of 92 characters ... all with the sound shi!


Meanwhile! My life has recently been overtaken (yet again!) by ... hold your breath ... FACEBOOK. I am resisting it in small ways -- for instance, I don't spend the WHOLE day online, but only 15 hours out of 24. Quite restrained, wouldn't you say? I've not signed up using my name as a (possibly feeble) means of keeping my presence there discreet but I realize this is a bit idiotic considering the site is really a form of existential striptease in which the participants hang all the wet and sticky bits of their lives out on the clothesline of the web for all to see. Since I need to reserve my sticky bits for exposure in my books, I simply can't afford to do any of that! So if some of you avid Facebookers want to catch up with my FB persona you're going to have to post messages to me and if I feel like it, I'll respond with a link and handle.

Free Heart Surgery

A friend who lives Madurai (I met him last year, at the American College) sent me a message to share with as wide a circle of people as possible. So here it is:

For all kinds of Heart-Related Surgeries, Free of Cost please contact:
Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences
EPIP Area, Whitefield,
Bangalore 560 066,
Karnataka, INDIA.
Telephone: +91- 080- 28411500
Fax +91 - 080- 28411502
e-mail: adminblr@sssihms.org.in
You can visit Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences online for further links and/or to clear up any doubts you might have about the authenticity of the institution. There are probably hundreds of people out there who might benefit from this information, so I figure it's worth passing on!


And meanwhile, on the subject of good works, I thought I'd share this list of Very Special People that MSN created. While I don't like their title for the list -- 10 Amazing Women You've Never Heard Of -- because in the first place I HAVE heard of some of them (at least five) and in the second place it seems a strangely condescending inclusion principle -- I must admit that I was impressed by the list and was glad to have pictures and brief bio-data to remind me of them.

I was going to post a picture to accompany the list, but decided against it on second thoughts. If you're curious, go click the link!

IMMORTALITY

Well -- it's that time of year in Delhirium when all normal people turn their thoughts to the warm and wonderful subject of ... mortality! Yep. The end of the monsoon, that period between the rains and winter, when the atmosphere is soupier than the water in which naive young frogs get boiled to death*(*okay, so you don't know what I'm referring to? It's that old cautionary tale in which you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water and watch it jump right out. But throw it into a pot with room temperature water, then slowly turn up the heat and ... it'll get cooked before it can save itself)(side note: lab experiments have apparently disproved this rather cruel story).

SOoooo okay. Back to mortality. Or, as it turns out, IMmortality. There's a book with this catchy title -- HOW TO LIVE FOREVER OR DIE TRYING by Bryan Appleyard -- which suggests that immortality may not be such a far-fetched idea after all. This review from TIMES ONLINE is what got me thinking that I'd like to read the book.

NOT because I especially want to live forever. But then again ... maybe I'm just saying that coz I KNOW I won't? I mean, the methods discussed in the book are not likely to be available to people of my age and decrepitude but (according to the book's author) there may already be people alive now who will become eligible for the use of new technologies which will enable them to ward off death indefinitely. They wouldn't be immortal in the mystical sense -- i.e., a falling grand piano would put an end to their days as thoroughly as it would anyone else's days -- but at least they would not be succumbing to mere old age 'n' tumours.

I must say, it would be rather horrid to be living alongside jerks who, when you say something like "Well ... after all, all things come to an end .." can riposte with, SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, MICROBE!

But really: can you imagine what it might be like to live for ...oh ... 1000 years? One major casualty, it seems to me, would be temporal vows and promises. I mean, who would want to swear Eternal Love if there was the slightest chance a relationship would really last for more than 50 or 60 years? Imagine being stuck with the same spouse for 10 times the normal life span! Yow.

Diamonds would no longer be anyone's best friend ...

Peace! Silence! Orchids!

BROMELIADES,OrchidRetreat
PALMS IN THE MIST, OrchidRetreat
ORCHIDS,HiddenForest

This is just a very brief teaser-trailer about my recent trip to Sikkim -- it was a sudden trip that blew up out of the monsoon mists of last week, while I was still in Madras with my Mom -- oo! I haven't posted anything about THAT trip either (except that I watched APOCALYPTO on my laptop while I was in Madras, and posted about that)!! Hmm. Well -- let's just say, I went to Madras on the 2nd, stayed till the ninth, returned to Delhirium and left for Kalimpong/Gangtok on the llth! Returned just yesterday evening, tuckered out but very pleased with the way the trip turned out.

It wouldn't be fair to blog about the trip before I write my report for OUTLOOK TRAVELLER, the magazine responsible for despatching me to the mountains -- so of course I won't. But it won't harm anyone if I post the addresses of the two charming resorts at which I stayed: The Orchid Retreat in Kalimpong and The Hidden Forest Retreat in Gangtok, Sikkim.

Rant of the Moment

poster pic from: www.atomicmpc.com.au
Mel Gibson’s APOCALYPTO took me by surprise. For some reason, I believed it was a science-fiction film -- apparently, I had managed to miss seeing any trailers. The billboards I saw in Boston managed to conceal the fact that it’s a tale of lyric violence set in the jungles of South America, in “the twilight of the mysterious Mayan empire” (from the DVD case cover), probably the late fifteenth century.

I was intrigued by it. On the one hand, it held my attention. On the other hand, I found little distracting thoughts buzzing like flies across my field of vision all the way through.

The story concerns a warrior (Jaguar Paw) belonging to a tribe of jungle-dwellers who find themselves being brutally raided and taken prisoner by another tribe. It isn’t very clear whether these others are soldiers belonging to the rulers of an urban clan or whether they are urban beings themselves, who round up jungle-dwellers as part of their normal weekday occupation.

Whatever the case, they force-march Jaguar Paw and all the able-bodied members of his tribe who survived the raid, to the local metropolis. Its skyline is dominated by tall pyramid-shaped temples where the priest and his patrons are indulging in the practice for which South American cultures have become infamous in the gaze of Western pop culture, i.e., tearing out the still-beating hearts of sacrificial victims in order to offer their blood to the gods. Jaguar Paw narrowly escapes this fate by means of a handy total solar eclipse whereupon he and the surviving clan members are given a chance to run to their freedom – that is, if they can first survive being pelted with arrows, bolas and spears by the urban warriors while sprinting across a stretch of open ground before reaching the safety of the jungle.

Jaguar Paw manages to make it to cover, but kills the lead warrior’s son in the bargain, thereby earning the privilege of being chased by ten of the warrior-urbs. The chase takes up the final third of the movie, with the pursuers being picked off in each of several different ways: a jaguar in one case, a poisonous serpent in another, at the foot of a great water-fall in a fourth, a hornet’s nest in a fifth and so on. MEANWHILE – and this of course is the reason that Jaguar Paw is so frantic to get back to his ravaged home – his heavily pregnant wife awaits him, at the bottom of a (highly convenient) deep stone cavity into which he managed to lower her and their young son just before being taken captive.

And so to the distracting thoughts: how authentic is any movie set in an “exotic” culture, when the director and producer (and much of the cast) are outsiders to that culture? For all that this film was lush with detail, with jungle, with able-bodied warriors, and for all that it was refreshingly free of the presence of a Western narrator/adventurer who would typically provide the viewer with a familiar reference point for all the action onscreen, the story was pretty much formula Wild West: the hero is the chief’s son, he’s got a romantic monogamous bond going with his doe-eyed little wifey, they have one son in hand and another child on its way – and of course, it’s never possible to see a pregnant woman but she’s got to deliver onscreen – so we get to confirm that it IS a son, what else – and the hero's got to kill/outrun the bad guys so that he can walk off into the verdant jungle with his true love and their kiddies.

Should I applaud Gibson for attempting a film that treats hunter-gatherers as heroes in the Western genre? Or should I be appalled at his transformative vision, that taints everything he sees with the urgencies and values of his own culture, that forces a narrative attractive to his own taste upon a people who cannot challenge his interpretation with their own – because (a) they were exterminated by the colonizing westerners who appeared upon their shores and (b) even if they were available today in their pristine form, the technology for story-telling that is used in making films would be too distorting for them to tell their own stories to a film-going audience while maintaining authenticity and finally (c) even if, by some miracle, an Ancient Mayan film-maker were to be found who could make a stirring block-buster about his/her own vision of reality ... which distributor would pick it up or release it?

So even though I felt a genuine sense of pleasure at the risk-taking creativity involved in a project of this sort, I couldn’t help playing a favorite little mind-game of mine, in which I transpose clothes and characters from one culture onto scenes featuring some other culture. The first time I thought of doing it was while watching a Discovery Channel program about Kalahari Bushmen. One of the closing shots showed a couple of the tiny bushmen kneeling to drink water from a stream – rather than cup the water with their hands or use some sort of utensil, they instead leaned down and drank with their mouths to the water, just like a pair of antelope.

In that instant, an image flashed in my mind of two pin-stripe suited businessmen – London bankers, say – kneeling down and drinking in the same position ... we do all belong to a single species of hominid, do we not? ... Two suburban housewives, in their flowered housecoats and their hair tied up in jumbo rollers. Two fat sari-clad women, with their hair coiffed in shining black coils, complete with jewels and flowers. A flock of tourists with their cameras dangling from their necks and their straw hats pushed back onto their necks – you get the picture? I transpose urban characters onto scenes involving non-urbans, just to get a sense of perspective, to see whether it looks strange or not (and of course it does).

So with this movie, for instance, I tried to supplant the wife with a small blonde female – Reese Witherspoon, say – and of course, the scene changed character immediately. I didn’t have to do anything else – just the substitution of a white, blonde woman in the place of Jaguar Paw's wife immediately made the woman in the movie look like the subject of some type of perverse humans-as-wildlife docudrama. She was even shown to be struggling to stay alive as water begins to fill into the well in which she has been sheltering. In the most grotesque way, it brought to mind the dreadful experiment, recorded in pictures in a lab, of a wretched little rhesus monkey mother, being made first to drown in a long narrow receptacle with her baby – initially she places it on her head, as the water begins to fill, to give the baby a good chance of jumping to safety – but ultimately, when she knows she can’t save herself as well, she places the baby underneath herself and stands on its head (at least, that’s what reportedly happened in that particular instance).

Well, in Apocalypto of course the mother never places the baby underneath – she’s too busy giving birth!! – but it’s a pitifully demeaning image, all the same (even though it is undoubtedly meant to seem heroic).

I’m almost completely ignorant about South American aboriginal cultures, but I didn’t need to know anything to guess that what we saw was most likely an amalgam of anything vaguely resembling Mayan/Aztec/Incan cultures, because who except for scholars would know any better (it leaves one wondering why scholars’ opinions are so routinely disregarded … ) – for all that it seemed highly authentic, the chances are it was just a grab-all bag of cultural effects.

So .. ummm … what was the point of the film, again? Let us now praise modern civilization? Let us now hate Ancient Mayans/Ancient Warriors? Let us now revere monogamous love bonds coz they give us the incentive to run without stopping from the seriously psychotic hunter-warrior types who are hunting us? And then again, let us now fear monogamous love bonds coz they mean we can’t just die peacefully and quickly like the rest, but have to keep running until the Spanish ships arrive in time to distract the two remaining pursuers while we manage to FINALLY save our reproductive partner seconds before she drowns in an unprecedented flash flood ...

So yes, it was very beautiful and very violent – and also extremely disturbing on the cultural plane. I am sure the publicity handouts must have said that it was meant to honour the noble savages of the South American jungles, etc etc – but in the end, we’re surely left thinking that however handsome/charming/clever/brave/fleet-footed/proud they were, aren’t we glad-shitless-that-we’re-NOT-them?