Caprices

Post-Oxford, new blog

2006-06-15T14:17:00.000+01:00

For anyone interested, my new blog is here. There are too many interesting books, movies, plays, people happening around to keep quiet for too long a time!

Adieu

2006-06-06T14:04:00.000+01:00

This blog was begun in Oxford, and now that I am finally saying goodbye to the place, I don't want to carry on with it any longer. In a few week's time I will be back in India, and it will be another world altogether. I don't know if I would begin another blog. But I shall be posting in the Lit Blog in the mean time. Thank you readers for reading me all this while!

Bengali Music Videos

2006-05-29T21:05:00.000+01:00

This came to my attention thanks to Buchu. I am speechless. Please watch this.
Update: Errm, I don't know what's got into me (or rather, my friends), but here's another one, thanks to another friend.

Ella

2006-05-27T21:55:00.000+01:00

Bought this wonderful collection by Ella, which was recorded in the 1970s and then lost into obscurity. The Amazon reviewer says this:

This release presents two complete Ella Fitzgerald albums, Ella and Things Ain't What They Used To Be, made respectively in 1969 and 1971. The 1960s saw many former stars struggling as rock swept the popular music scene, and having been one of the greatest of all jazz singers for three decades, Fitzgerald did as so many others did: depending your on point of view, she either sold out or made a brave attempt to move with the times. These two sets, and the second is much stronger than the first, are very much of their era--a mix of pop, soul, R&B and MOR infused with as much jazz as Ella could squeeze into the sessions. It's a sometimes infectious brew, as on the rousing version of Randy Newman's "I Wonder Why", though "Black Coffee" finds Fitzgerald on much more rewarding territory, her voice as fine as ever when the music really allows her to shine. "Willow Weep For Me" is one of several gems from the second album, and though Ella gives her all throughout, when she belts out Duke Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" you know she's singing from the heart.

I simply adore Ella, and have many of her recordings - which must be in thousands! - but this one is unique, because she sings such a wide range of songs - R&B, soul, jazz, pop - you name it! My favourite song in this collection is, of course, the much-renowned 'Black Coffee'.

I feel like a pig shat in my head

2006-05-26T11:35:00.000+01:00

I can fully appreciate how Withnail must have felt in those hours of chronic hangover. I have been having one since 6 o' clock this morning. Yesterday I consumed gallons of alcohol, followed by the raunchiest mirth-making, lost many pieces of sub-fusc from my body, and felt incredibly sick at the end. All this to commemorate the ending of final exams. Now with a splitting headache, and a perpetual limbo of sickness in my guts, I wonder if I should have shown some moderation, after all.

Measure for Measure

2006-05-24T08:24:00.000+01:00

Somebody upstairs has got a piano these days; or at least, some sort of instrument that sounds like one. And Somebody(s) keep on pounding upon it all evening. I have tried telling my neighbours to show little more consideration, but failed to spur their humanitarian interests. Now I have taken to using the missives that I have in my sleeves. I play Wagner at full blast early in the morning. I have just begun with 'milder' ones - Wesendonck Lieder and Parsifal - but will soon graduate to The Ring des Niebelungens if these gentler tunes don't work. Hee hee.

La Vie En Rose

2006-05-22T20:48:00.000+01:00

Ladies and Gents, meet the divine In-grid.

Apparently, she is the queen of Euro-dance nowadays. I have been listening to previews of her tracks, and can't deny that she is good. She is more of a visual delight to me actually :). But that apart, she sings a wonderful, wonderful 'La vie en rose'. I think hers is the best cover I have heard recently after the one by Madeleine Peyroux. And odd as it might sound, I find the original Edith Piaf version quite hideous. I have been scheming ways of ripping this track, legally or otherwise, from www. But the only site where I could buy it from requires a $20 account balance to be able to buy a song which costs $0.10! I have i-Tunes, but I don't have an aol account and I am not, to my regret, a mac user. So I can't avail myself of the offers which are on Apple! This is very distressing. Especially, when you need loads of jazzy music, sung by androgynous-looking ladies, to sooth your Milton-ravaged nerves ...

Queer-ed

2006-05-20T22:43:00.000+01:00

A short review of William Burrough's Queer (Picador, 1985) here. Highly disturbing book, but extremely fascinating nonetheless. I had forgotten what the Beat style felt like ... a wonderful mixture of credulity, intensely personal revelations, equally intense impersonal feelings, and that high that comes with a nice line of tea ... the memories of yore flood back, and so do the books ... Gearing up for post-exam reading spree: the whole of Kerouac, Mailer, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Quite ambitious, but achievable aim, given how easily hooked you can become to all of them.

The Lit Gang

2006-05-20T11:37:00.000+01:00

We - the Lit Gang - have now founded our Lit Blog, where we will chatter incessantly about our Bibliophilia/mania. You are welcome to join the fun.

Walk the Line

2006-05-17T19:24:00.000+01:00

I have been listening to the complete soundtrack of Walk the Line (2005) here. I am increasingly enchanted and obsessed by Joaquin Phoenix, and ironically, like him better than Johnny Cash! Quite a dude he is!

Clavierübung

2006-05-16T17:20:00.000+01:00

My soul is inwardly ravished everytime I listen to my Maestro, J S Bach. Today I listened to the Goldberg Variations played on a harpsichord, for the first time. It sounds amazingly different from the way it feels on a piano (I have the much-renowned 1955 Glenn Gould recording). The first aria, my favourite piece of music ever possibly, is a masterstroke of economy and balance. I wish life was like that aria as well; neat, perfect, lucid, precise ....

Favourites

2006-05-15T21:01:00.000+01:00

Just discovered how favourite movies can help you cope with bloody exams. And this site dedicated to Withnail and I. You don't know you what you've missed so far in life, if you've missed this cult classic.
Some entertaining quotes to be found here. With that I will bid adieu.

Innocent

2006-05-13T17:19:00.000+01:00

I bought two 1 litre cartons of my favourite (daytime) drink, Innocent Pure Fruit Smoothie (mangoes and passion fruit), and after finishing it, turned the cardboard container upside down to find the following inscription:

"You should probably try opening this carton at the other end. Not that we're telling you how to run your life or anything, but it seems to work much easier when the drink comes out of the spout on the top".

Hmmm?

This is what I have come to

2006-05-12T23:11:00.000+01:00

I'm the Old Bod!

Old-fashioned even for Oxford, you're all about obscure ancient books and highly dubious thesis topics. Academic in the fusty and eccentric, rather than hard working, sense, Oxford is clearly the best place for you. Favourite word: "aporia". Least favourite: "relevant".

From Cherwell 24

Drowsiest poem?

2006-05-12T01:05:00.000+01:00

My darling dear, my daisy flower,
Let me, quod he, lie in your lap.
Lie still, quod she, my paramour,
Lie still hardely, and take a nap.
His head was heavy, such was his hap,
All drowsy dreaming, drowned in sleep,
That of his love he took no keep.
With, Hey, lullay, lullay, like a child,
Thou sleepest too long, thou art beguil'd.

Apparently this lyric, from the 1490s by John Skelton, was described by Edith Sitwell as 'the drowsiest poem in the English Language'. I hardly think so myself. On the contrary, its touching little lyric, subtle in its tone of sexual frustration and emotional betrayal, much to be made of in an exam question. Or so what I think myself. For me, nearer to Sitwell's own times, much of Tennyson is sedative enough.

Sighing, and sadly sitting by my books ....

2006-05-08T22:25:00.000+01:00

There won't be eye-catching, clever, subject lines on my posts henceforth. I am feeling decidedly unclever what with exams coming up in a week, and my horrors of exams as usual, compounded this time by an exceptionally hedonistic night-out in London last weekend, which included eating at Momo's on Picadilly, going dancing at a middle-eastern nightclub, chatting nine to the dozen with people, getting roaring drunk and getting back to Oxford at 4 in the morning, and feeling like a moron for the whole day clutching my aah-so-aching-head and wondering why on earth do I keep on moving from one degree to another and not say farewell to academics? I will, for sure, this time, when this nightmare's over. Anyway, I have been reading Richard Barnfield, Shakespeare's fellow poet who also wrote abject sonnets to sexy and callow young men, and this is one poem I like a lot. From Cynthia and Certaine Sonnets (1595):

Sighing, and sadly sitting by my love,

He asked the cause of my heart's sorrowing,

Conjuring me by heaven's eternal King

To tell the cause which me so much did move.

Compelled (quoth I), to thee will I confess,

Love is the cause, and only love it is

That doth deprive me of my heavenly bliss.

Love is the pain that doth my heart oppress.

And what is she (quoth he) whom thou dost love?

Look in this glass (quoth I), there shalt thou see

The perfect form of my felicity.

When, thinking that it would strange magic prove,

He opened it, and taking off the cover,

He straight perceived himself to be my lover.

Her Majesty, at lunch

2006-05-05T19:11:00.000+01:00

Her Majesty, the Queen, was visiting Oxford --- "for lunch with a friend", a policeman informed me cheekily when I asked him why --- and a motley crowd was gathered along High Street, expectantly waiting. Apart from university students, tourists, passers-by there were stewards from The Quod, shopkeepers etc. I stopped by as well and watched the whole traffic coming to stand-still. Bus-driver scowling in the beating sun, people aiming mobile phones and cameras to get a good photo, lots of chattering. It was quite merry, and as sensational as things will ever get on Oxford High Street, I guess. Eventually she passed by in a beautiful car, with a teeny-weeny convoy, dressed in a baby-pink suit and a lovely bonnet, waving at the crowd and looking very sweet. Hee, hee.

Maye the Thridde

2006-05-04T23:01:00.000+01:00

It was a glorious day, so I decided to give up whining and get a life. So I spent the afternoon catching up on some Marvell, which proved to be a vain effort what with excited voices right outside my window celebrating the glorious month of May ... by the way, the title is a silly attempt at showing off how well I have read my Chaucer (Eng Lits, can you remember this date in Chaucer, or do you, like many others I know, don't particularly approve of Mayster Chaucere?).

Anyway, that done, went to afternoon tea at Chez Gaston with principessa and the grande duchess, and finally ended up dining with them, and then post yummy dinner, tried watching Barsaat (1949). Now it was a superhit film in its time, but clearly its time has passed. The old is not gold, but pure unalloyed drudge.To be honest we gave up after the first half. By which time I was tired to death by a nagging, whining, tearful Nimmi bewailing her ill-matched love for a promiscuous Prem Chopra, wasting no opportunity in literally bathing his feet with tears whenever she was given an opportunity to do so; and Nargis had been virtually drowned in the tides of Bhagirathi, or Ganga, or whatever turbulent mountainous river you can imagine, tossed along the rapids, thrown off the falls, and then rescued by a half-witted man who called himself 'Bholu'. All this while, Raj Kapoor was playing Orff's Carmina Burana on his violine, madly moving his fingers along the four strings and of course producing tuneful music nonetheless. The dialogue all this while was brimming with metaphors, metonyms, hyperboles, highly wrought Urdu thrown into Hindi, and too much for the three of us to endure any longer, which is why we gave up and switched off this parody. It felt like a parody really. It did. Only Nargis looked so utterly divine.

Aaah, my aching head ...

2006-05-03T20:43:00.000+01:00

I have a major excuse to rave, rant and basically exceed my stipulated bandwidth of being a whiner, what with the finals coming up. This morning somone had the wonderful sense of telling me about his fun weekend in Berlin, reminding me vividly of those long walks on the Museum Insel that my legs cry for, that sip of Schultheiss in Bier Garten that my parched lips thirst for. In the end I couldn't take it any more and pretended there was technical problem with my phone (which most often there is, although during that fateful conversation my phone was astonishingly well-behaved), before cutting him off. Then I listened to the wonderful 'Tanz der sieben schleier' that I have in my Solti recording and Birgit Nilsson singing a truly infernal Salome (pic left), made me reminisce restlessly about that glorious evening in the Deutsche-Oper last year when I saw Susan Anthony as Salome (see pic on right). Ah. Well. Life's going to be an even more wonderfully cynical journey now that I am to be home-bound and look for jobs. Wunderbar.

44 Scotland Street

2006-05-02T11:19:00.000+01:00

Alexander McCall Smith never fails to entertain, amuse and instruct - all at once. With 44 Scotland Street, which was serialised daily over three months in The Scotsman, a daily published in Edinburgh, he takes his art to new dimensions. This kind of book, published in daily instalments, is perhaps unique for our times, but it was quite a popular practice in Victorian England. Dickens, Thakeray, Trollope wrote for dailies, weeklies and monthlies, which must have been extraordinarily challenging. As McCall Smith explains in the introduction, at one point he was just three instalments ahead of the current one, which must have caused him a lot of stress. You might say that the book suffers for this reason - its moody incoherence, slight over-writings, some irrelevant chapters etc. But the sharpness, beautiful prose and the humour makes up for all of this. It was really refreshing reading McCall Smith after some time. He never fails to put me in touch with a benign, less disgruntled side of my personality, and restores my interest in human beings when the circumstances have become conducive to the formation of attitudes to the contrary of interest.

Katie Melua

2006-05-01T21:29:00.000+01:00

Sir Parsifal, trudging through the generally deplorable contemporary. musical productions, has suddenly hit gold with this lovely lady. Listen to Katie Melua's new Blues album Piece by Piece. Its absolutely spitze! She has an amazingly dramatic voice, and you get completely addicted to the songs, which are simply wonderful. Here's the lyrics from my favourite, the title song. I wish I were tech-savvy and could have put up the song itself, but then the copyright issues would have been thornier. Not that putting up the lyrics is innocent. But, oh well, here it is, the classic break-up song sung extremely beautifully:

"Piece By Piece"

First of all must go
Your scent upon my pillow
And then I'll say goodbye
to your whispers in my dreams.
And then our lips will part
In my mind and in my heart,
Cos your kiss
Went deeper than my skin.

Piece by piece
is how I'll let go of you
Kiss by kiss
Will leave my mind one at a time
One at a time

First of all must fly,
My dreams of you and I,
There's no point of holding on to those
And then our ties will break,
For your and my own sake,
Just remember,
This is what you chose

Piece by piece
Is how I'll let go of you
Kiss by kiss,
will leave my mind one at a time
One at a time

I'll shed like skin,
Our memories of lazy days,
And fade away the shadow of your face

Piece by piece
Is how I'll let go of you
Kiss by kiss,
Will leave my mind one at a time
One at a time
One at a time
One at a time

Neighbours

2006-04-30T14:09:00.000+01:00

For the past two years, I haven’t been able to have one night of uninterrupted sleep, thanks to my wonderful neighbours. In the first year my room was located in the heart of the city, which was wonderful; but then, it was almost on the street itself, on the ground floor of a dingy little house. The front door was right next to my room, and pranksters would press the bell and run away in vicious glee, in the wee hours, when they had ended their nocturnal mirth. My flatmates were immensely sociable, wonderful people, but got a bit out of control with a little too much drink, which happened every other night. Result: I would lie awake in bed, listening to the front door banging into the late hours and groups of people came in and went out and came back, chattering, quarrelling, exchanging intimacies etc. I have been privy to a good many sleazy assignations, which had taken place right against my damned door.

All this was happening inside the house, of course. Outside there were other stories unfolding in their full ugliness. Drunken fights breaking out among couples, screaming, kicking, evil laughter … oh, quel horreur! It culminated, one night, in serious trouble, when a woman started f-ing madly at her man for checking out some other girl while they were out, and then throwing a bottle at him, which missed him and hit my neighbour’s window and shattered the glass. It was bang in the middle of December, so you can imagine how poor D had to spend that night in a room with a shattered window pane! Shortly afterwards he moved out of his room, and the room was offered to an unsuspecting J, who, lost as he was in his study of classics, had not stopped to wonder or ask why he was offered a new room in the middle of term. I let the cat out of the bag one day inadvertently, and observing the distressed wonderment on his innocent face, have regretted doing it, ever since.

Now I live in a remote corner of the town, away from humanity, with my window opening on to a wild assortment of flora and fauna which form a ‘garden’. And my neighbours are as noisy as ever, trampling in full glory all over my head, while I curse and mutter in my room on the ground floor. There are people still coming in and going out of the house at odd hours. Additionally, there is Billoo who throws tantrums at the weirdest hours, scratching on the French windows wanting to be let in, or better still, if he is inside the room with me then he jumps upon the bed and snuggles against my feet as I am sleeping. Imagine being woken up by a growling, furry, warm creature tickling your feet in the middle of the night. So, I have been unable to get some proper sleep for months now. Result: I doze off in the Bod, or in the middle of a tutorial, or a lecture on the wonders of the history of the English language. But amazingly, instead of being piqued, I have started being amused by these neighbourly (and feline) tyrannies, lately.

Dream Cats, Or a Cry for Help

2006-04-30T04:47:00.000+01:00

Now, here is a conundrum for all you amateur psycho-analysts to solve. I have been having the following dream for the past few nights:

I am about to enter my house in Calcutta, when I look up and see three cats sitting on and looking down on me from the high wall that sort-of surrounds the house. Two of the cats are facing each other, while the other one is facing away from them, hence has its back to one of them. This latter is a big fat male cat, presumably my current one called Billoo, and resolutely faces away from the other, slimmer females. Now comes the scarier bit. The thinner cats, facing each other, are my first cat (called Mopa, who is supposedly long-dead, or should be so, unless she has drunk the elixir of life or really laid claims on some of her mythical nine lives), and the one which I had before I left home, called Leon, a disdainful tabby who scorned me like a Petrarchan mistress. I can't think of what they are saying to each other as they look down on me from those Parnassian heights. And what exactly Billoo, you fat, lazy, stupid cat, are you doing with those sophisticated ladies up their on the wall???

I have come up with the following interpretations for this 'gostly drem' (literally this is kind of 'ghostly' because one of the cats is actually dead here):

a) the most obvious: my tommy is jealous of my ever having those adorable tabbies, so he is in love with me and therefore he is gay. Which is quite likely, seeing the way he snuggles up to me all the time.
b) the non-obvious: there are some shameful Freudian things happening here which a frivolous, scatterbrained knight like me (who has nothing better but 'I wonder' to say when asked to describe himself: see my profile) can barely come to imagine.

Interestingly, tonight I thought of my one of my closest friends, Mayster Geoffrey Chaucere, when I woke up. I don't know if I thought of him or if he was also part of the dream because I could distinctly hear him chuckle ... now he is a veritable prankster, as many of you already know very well, so I wonder if he is responsible for this deeply disturbing dream. Lastly, I attach a picture of Billoo with this post because I am rather absurdly fond of him. (There, this might be some kind of clue for this dream ... but again, poor Parsifal can only wonder ...)

Dan Brown's Judgment

2006-04-28T11:06:00.000+01:00

The "story" of The Da Vinci Code has had an imapct more far-reaching that the story in the book itself. The recently passed judgment on accusations of plagiarism has been discovered to have been encoded. Read this article in the Guardian to find out more. More amusingly, Lincoln cathedral, which is doubling for Westminister Abbey, had initially not given permission to shoot the film of DVC because the book is "theologically unsound". The theology has suddenly become acceptable after the producers "donated" (what a cringeworthy word!) £100,000 to the cathedral. And finally, among many other exciting, or droll, pieces in the Guardian (scroll down to the end of the page for more reports), there is one on Sister Mary Michael who has led demonstrators to act against the "heresy" of the book. I think there will now be a book which will chronicle this bizarre sequence of events that has been set off by Dan Brown's trashy novel. Then The Guardian will run another spate of articles on that book, and so on. So much of what we read and write is purely motivated by (most often cheap) thrill, these days.

Dead From the Waist Down, A. D. Nuttall (Yale University Press, 2003)

2006-04-20T12:05:00.000+01:00

A. D. Nuttall's latest book, Dead From the Waist Down, whose brilliantly apposite title derives from Browning's famous description of the Grammarian in 'A Grammarian's Funeral', combines fascinating exploration of history of ideas with intellectual biography. In this book, Nuttall explores the relationship between Scholarship and Sexuality and how that relationship is perceived in the popular imagination.

For this purpose he chooses to dicuss three notable characters, who are devoted scholars in their own ways. The scholars who feature in the book are - the seventeenth century commentator Isaac Casaubon, his nineteenth century biographer Mark Pattison, who was a formidable scholar in his own right; and finally the fictional character of the Dryasdust scholar in George Eliot's Middlemarch, who was (wrongly) believed to have been modelled on Mark Pattison, Mr. Casaubon, whose great labour of his lifetime 'A Key to All Mythologies' (his Golden Bough) remains unfinished at his death not because it was too extensive an enterprise but because of sheer faulty methodology and lack of real scholarly gifts.
In fact, the question around which the thesis of this book is built, hinges on the definition of 'real' scholarship and how it relates (or fails to relate) to life. Nuttall's other insight into scholarship is the way in which scholars transfer their own personal anxieties, failures, paranoias, on to the subjects of their study. The most prominent example of this is Mark Pattison, who was a 'real' scholar in exactly the ways in which Mr. Casaubon wasn't, whose majestarial 'Life of Isaac Casaubon' published in the 1870s (still unparalleled) was deeply influenced by his personal life and predilections. For him, as for his near-contemporary A. E Housman, scholarship was a way of dealing with their own deepest wishes and impulses. In the stunning final chapter on Tom Stoppard's 1997 masterpiece The Invention of Love, whose hero is the dead Housman recollecting his life in a Virgilian underworld as he is rowed over Styx by Charon, Nuttall shows how Housman's icy classical scholarship was not as dry as it is generally perceived to have been. It was rather a mask behind which he hid his homosexuality, particularly his unrequited love for his friend Moses Jackson. It is heartening to read Nuttall write on Stoppard - a fittingly brilliant piece of literary commentary on an equally deserving work of great art.

There are many reasons for recommending this book. Despite its digressions, its unapologetic old-school critical style, this is a book which brings the world of ideas to life. It also moves every prospective, or temperamentally motivated, scholar-in-the-making, and enables them to identify the roots of their deepest sympathies and anxieties. But the chiefest among all these reasons for which I would heartily recommend this book is because it is a sheer delight to savour the cadence of the relaxed and beautifully conversational prose style..

The History of Love, Nicole Krausse (Penguin, 2005)

2006-03-21T11:17:00.000Z

This book, one of the most amazing ones I have read recently, begins with this serio-comic declaration: "When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APPARTMENT FULL OF SHIT ." It tells the story of Leo Gursky, Polish Jew, forced into exile in New York City in the wake of the Nazi persecution, surviving into the twenty-first century all alone, striving at his "books", which are probably never going to be published. The first of these, written in Yiddish, and given to his friend Zvi Livtinoff in the 1930s for safe-keeping was called The History of Love. It appeared subsequently under Livtinoff's name, in Spanish, and created a stir, unknown to Leo himself. The book is bought by a Jewish young man in the 1950s, David Singer, and given to his wife-to-be, as a token of his love. Then the book vanishes from public memory. The Singers forget all about it. Until one day Mrs Singer, a renowned translator, gets a letter asking her to translate the book into English for the handsome renumeration of $100,000. Alma Singer, Mrs. Singer's daughter, is inquisitive to find out about the identity of this letter-writer/benefactor, Jacob Macus, and sets out on her trail of discovery. In the mean time Leo Gursky starts getting his own book sent to him in an English translation. Hard at work on his latest book, Words for Everything, Gursky wonders about this incredible turn of events, unable to comprehend anything about this fantastic visitation from the past. The plot gets more and more complex as you read, but delightfully so, in a manner of the Borgesian intrigue. To discover the end, is the greatest moment of this book. This is a wholly original piece of fiction, and it restores my faith in the pleasures of reading for the sake of pure entertainement. Nicole Krauss is just 32, and this is her second novel. Read it to be entertained and enthralled.

Da Vinci Fiasco

2006-03-15T00:29:00.000Z

Guardian's Culture Vulture blog discusses the Dan Brown vs. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh fiasco. Maev Kennedy mentions the most glaring absence in the trial, Brown's wife, Blythe, who shares a great deal of his research and writing. Brown has assured the court that he is good enough to answer all questions on her behalf, because as it is they work exceptionally closely, and she would go by whatever version he chooses to tell the court. This is itself enough ground for a conspiracy theory for me. Then, even more astonishingly, he claims not to have read The Holy Grail and the Holy Blood until after Da Vinci was published. Is this remotely credible? Apart from the fact that most of the basic facts in the two books are similar, or share a common ground, Brown mentions Baigent and Leigh's work as essential reading on page 48 of his own book! His explanation for this reference, that he read the book in detail much later despite mentioning it earlier, is as absurd as the evidence that the lawyers are trying to dreg up with a heavily earmarked, underlined and perused copy of The Holy Grail in Brown's possession.

I am yet to read The Holy Grail (in fact I am starting with it soon), but I must confess that I found Dan Brown's book very bad. Somewhat annoying, and mildly rivetting in bits, while you are at it, but completely trashy after you've been through it. I was especially aghast by the ending. People with experience of the Hindi film industry in India would find the reunion with lost sibling thing quite familiar and inane, and unsentimentally hilarious. If you want to read good historical fiction, read Eco. Brown's book is a sad effort at creating a basis for a hollywood flick at best. (And its already on it's way, I'm told). Incidentally, I was reading about Opus Dei, and they mention Brown's extensive 'tampering' or 'misrepresentation' of their activites in their website very sternly, but not severely enough. There isn't enough ire in their detraction of Brown, which sort of makes me wonder vaguely about their activities ... more thoughts to come after I finish the Holy Grail ...

Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (2006): A Personal Take

2006-03-06T19:49:00.000Z

I am quite amazed that Brokeback Mountain didn't win. Crash just doesn't justify the choice, simply because it is eminently forgettable and rather trite. And I don't for a moment believe that racism is a greater taboo than homosexuality in Hollywood, so the argument that the film deserves an Oscar just because it boldly explores a forbidden theme is hardly persuasive! Anyway, this was a review of Brokeback Mountain I wrote for a journal:

Amor Vincit Omnia

Even if there are more than two of them, the model will almost always be furnished by a twosome, by some great couples of friends. Always men. Well, more often than not, and that is what counts; it is of them that one speaks – the two of them, it is the twosome that is kept in memory and whose legend is revived.

Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (1997)

Fundamental mode of amorous subjectivity: a word, an image reverberates painfully in the subject’s affective consciousness.

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (1977)

‘Brokeback Mountain’ (2005) by director Ang Lee, based on Annie Proulx’s much acclaimed eponymous short story (first published in The New Yorker in 1997) is, what might be generously described as, a meditation on the modalities of friendship. To be more precise, it explores, among many other things, the amorous undercurrents latent in the very notion of friendship; the etymological roots of the word ‘friend’, after all, can be traced back to the old Teutonic verb ‘frijôjan’, ‘to love’. Friendship is at the core of the story, and in fact, the word ‘friend’ is used, with a touching simplicity, by the two men, Jack Twist and Ennis del Maar, around whom the narrative unfolds, to address each other in their letters. The story, on the page as also on the screen, concerns these two ranch hands, who happen to initiate a curious friendship on Brokeback Mountain, one that begins in companionship and blossoms into a sexual relationship and finally, over time, becomes amatory. Even as this relationship develops into a way of life for each of them, despite the fact that this life remains secreted and hidden from everyone else, they create and nurture in their individual ways a template of social existence which includes ‘more than two of them’ – their respective wives and children. The ‘twosome’ of their relationship is invaded by ‘others’ all along; but ‘what counts’ is only the enduring ‘legend’ of the ‘two of them’.

‘Brokeback Mountain’ is certainly a legend in its own right. It began, as Annie Proulx herself stated in an interview, as an exploration of ‘southern homophobia’, until, with its publication, it became a classic. It was boldly forthcoming in its depiction, and distinctly original in its treatment, of same-sex love, and yet preserved a basic tragic model around the story, a classic myth one might say, of failed love, spurned by the triumph of time. The film is layered and highly textured in its uses of the mythology of love: ‘Love is a force of nature’, one reads on the posters, a statement that dwells silently on the dualities of the word ‘nature’ – human nature, that is the well-spring of love; and the natural world, that looms large over the film in the form of the vast expansive wilderness of Brokeback Mountain. This is also the super-natural that forges this love. And furthermore, this love is protected by and expressed in a natural setting for nearly a decade, as the two men arrange to spend time together away from their respective families, with the ostensible excuse of fishing, hunting, and camping in the wilderness. The film exploits the quiet beauty, the brooding recesses of this unpopulated natural terrain to suggest a form of inwardness, that ‘affective consciousness’, which is so primitive and essential to the two men.

Beyond this restatement of the sociological contours of romantic love, by substituting two men for a man and woman, the film presents a fundamental challenge to a deep-seated Western iconographic tradition. This iconography is that of the lonely cowboy defined against a landscape, scarce of humanity but replete with the sharp economies of natural life. This figure of the western cowboy – solitary, brooding, macho, rugged and somewhat uncouth – cast against a backdrop of the sublime and desolate Brokeback Mountain is defamiliarized; and yet its identifying features, as enumerated parenthetically above, retained and preserved for the greater part of the movie. The ‘cowboys’ never stop being ‘cowboys’, even after they had discovered their passions for each other. They can scarcely address their feelings, or what might best be described as their elective affinities for each other. "You know I ain't queer," Ennis tells Jack the morning after they make love for the first time, to which Jack concurs, "Me neither."

The unspeakable nature of this emotion haunts both the men all along; although, at a later stage Jack repeatedly suggests their getting together in Texas and running his father’s farm in a happily ever after mode of bucolic romance. One is, perhaps rather oddly, reminded of the two shepherds in Virgil's Eclogues, who are also 'Friends', and something of that primal, bucolic setting, so exquisitely wrought in Virgil, which is also there in Proulx's story, although there the Virgilian exquisiteness is turned into something insuperably tragic. Meliboeus in the First Eclogue looks at his friend Tityrus lying under the beech tree, free of care, and yet, he observes soulfully, ‘… we are leaving our country’s bounds and sweet fields. We are outcasts from our country …’ I have de-contexualized Virgil here, but the core of emotion that goes into the futility of Jack and Ennis’ love for each other is very much resonant with this Virgilian elegiac mood , the ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ memento that shatters the benignity of the pastoral world . Only, with Jack and Ennis, there is much more corrosive in their emotional upheavals, something beyond language, which gets translated into the fits of momentary violence between them, or even when Jake crosses over to Mexico for a one-nighter. But fundamentally these emotions remain inexpressible, devoid of articulacy, trapped in a region of the impossible. There are, for these reasons, two languages operating in the story: what the two men cannot articulate, and what the narrator articulates for them, and about them. This struggle with the ineffable and the unfathomable has been remarkably captured on screen by Heath Ledger (Ennis) and Jake Gyllenhaal (Jack), by their suggestive acting and the incredible body language. While Gyllenhaal is engaging as the more free-wheeling of the two, Ledger is powerfully impressive as a man ill-equipped to deal with what life throws at him. Mumbling, uncertain, internalizing everything, Ledger as Ennis at times looks as though he is going to explode from his inchoate feelings. It is their deft acting that conveys cinematically the gist of what the narrator of their story tells us in print. Equally brilliant are the two wives, Anne Hathaway as Lureen Newsome and Michelle Williams as Alma, in the way they deal with the emerging and evolving knowledge of their husbands’ twosome-ness.

To refer to such a complex and layered film as a ‘gay cowboy movie’ or condemning it for depicting a negative, or rather, a non-progressive view of homosexual love is mere dallying with clichés without getting to the heart of the matter. For me the film tells a story about time, about time thinning out and finally ceasing to be there at all between two people. The extinction of the present and the future by Jack’s death, and the residue of the past that death leaves behind, is beautifully captured in Ennis's visit to Jack's family home in Lightning Flat to retrieve Jack's ashes to scatter them on Brokeback Mountain. The sepulchral interior of the house, the stark, minimalism of the scene, the vast empty stretches of land surrounding it, lend an other-worldly quality to this scene. Ennis ascends the deathly, bare stairs to Jack's room where he finds the only true repositories of any of the memories of Jack’s past, as also their shared past – a cowboy figurine, presumably one that Ennis had carved during their first encounter on Brokeback, and the two shirts hidden away from the prying eyes of the world. One imagines that this must have also been hidden away by Jack from his father. With these shirts and a postcard of Brokeback Mountain Ennis del Maar retires as a recluse.

Ang Lee's heart-wrenching final shot juxtaposes the two shirts hanging on the door of Ennis's closet, his personal shrine to Jack, with the wind-swept fields of ripening golden grain visible through the window. The powerful superimposition of an Arcadian richness in the world outside on to the private crevices of painful memories, complete the conquest of love. For the story is also about the cruelties of love, about learning to grapple with the two-facedness of ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’. Just as love conquers all the forces of social disapproval, so does it destroy; just as it conquers internal resistances, people are also conquered by the sheer ruthlessness of its force. "Sex is not a fatality," Foucault wrote, "it’s a possibility for creative life." For me, the tragedy of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is the election into a glimpse of that possibility without being able to, or allowed to, do anything with it and for it, and then to be destroyed by everything that the vision of it has engendered in one's life.

Mercury Falling, Sting (1996)

2006-03-04T23:29:00.000Z

Sting's 1996 album Mercury Falling was one of his less successful releases. It's my personal favourite, though. When it came out, I was in school, and for reasons of insufficient pocket money I never managed to buy the album! Thereafter I had looked for it in vain. Yesterday, I got lucky. I picked it up at the HMV sale for £6.99 (Retail Price: £16.99!).

It is quite a remarkable album, beginning with a bang and ending with a bang. The words 'Mercury Falling' begin the first song and end the last one, and within this parenthetical space we have a drama of broken relationships. In some ways, this is a "late" album. The music has mellowed and ripened into poetry, and proceeded into a beyond-eros phase of meditative self-discovery. The love songs are not so much about love as about the inability to sustain human relationships. The most haunting song is perhaps 'I am so happy that I can't stop crying' relating the divorce of a man from his wife, and how he deals with the realities of his suddenly curtailed fatherhood. There is a happy upbeat music to this song, hardly the usual soulful lament that such songs turn out to be, and yet the words are quite stunning:

The park is full of Sunday fathers and melted ice cream
We try to do the best within the given time
A kid should be with his mother
Everybody knows that
What can a father do but baby-sit sometimes?

Around the edges of the beautiful musical arrangements there are crusts of sorrow:

Mercury Falling
I rise from my bed.
Collect my thoughts together
I have to hold my head
It seems that she's gone
And somehow I am pinned by
The Hounds of Winter
Howling in the Wind

You can even hear the voice imitating the howling wind and the hounds in a peculiar harmony with the strings. This mode of self-address becomes very direct in 'Let Your Soul be Your Pilot' and 'I was brought to my senses'. The former is self-explanatory, and the latter a love song, but a most peculiar one at that. The narrator goes out walking one evening wondering how to win over his beloved, only to be led into a mystical, intuitive feeling that she already belongs to him. If you listen to this song, you will realise the complexity that good music can add to such seemingly inane lyrics. The lyrics are actually anything but inane; there is no assurance, despite this epiphany, that they will actually be together. This spirit of delusive comfort, a kind of make-believe, provisional scheme of happiness is sustained until the end of the album, ending with the plea to 'Lithium Sunset' to

Heal my soul
O Lithium Sunset
And I'll ride the turning world
Into another world.

See Mercury Falling ...

Additionally, there's a superb french song, with jazzy sax and keyboards, called 'La Belle Dame Sans Regrets'. Par Excellence, I say.