aaahfooey

Weird Zombie Science by Djinn & Miskatonic

2012-01-27T17:54:00.000+05:30

Scarecrow And The Army Of Thieves by Mathew Reilly

2012-01-23T07:51:00.000+05:30

Vast lumps of state-of-the-art equipment collide with each other. Massive explosions and incessant gunfire rip through an isolated island north of the former USSR. Amphibious vehicles, robots, megatrains, all sorts of aircraft and even one robot battle it out as the fate of nearly half the world hangs in the balance.

Oh, and there are people operating most of this machinery. Did I mention that? Welcome to the world of Jack Schofield, a US military operative with near-superhuman powers. Together with a small and ill-assorted group, including a sexy French assassin who is assigned to kill him and an Italian-American soldier whose surname is Puzo and who turns out to have Mafia ties – you can’t make this stuff up, or rather, if your name is Mathew Reilly, you can – Schofield, nicknamed Scarecrow, has to battle against long odds and to the sound of a ticking clock. In the process, he is shot at, tortured and even killed for a while. Yes, you read that correctly.

The premise is pure pulp fiction: a mysterious organization called the Army Of Thieves kidnaps dangerous criminals with military training from high-security prisons and steals a formidable array of military equipment from around the world. They then take control of an obscure Russian island where they intend to detonate a secret weapon that has the potential to destroy the whole world. The timeline is so short that the rest of the world has no time to send specialized troops in to save the day; instead they have to depend on whatever personnel happen to already be deployed in the area on other missions. Luckily for the world (or at least half of it), one of these people happens to be Schofield.

This is strictly escapist fare: while there is some attempt made to resolve long-standing character storylines from previous novels in this series, there’s more time spent naming and describing various items of military hardware than on what few instances of character insight that find their way into this breakneck narrative. Escapism has its place in the world, and the author makes no bones about the fact that he writes to entertain. The blockbuster sales of his many novels make it clear that a vast public is equally willing to read his books to be entertained, and they won’t be disappointed by this latest piece of adrenalized chest-thumping.

It seems unfair to criticize a book for adhering to the tenets of its genre so faithfully – a bit like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. And the thriller novel, like any other form has its own rules and tropes. Reilly applies these parameters skillfully to create a white-knuckle headlong narrative with sufficient reversals, revelations and colourful characters to keep up the pace. He’s working on the more brutal, grueling end of the thriller spectrum here, and that’s fair enough too. However, the choppy, functional prose can feel a bit bland and plodding just when one wishes for vivid description or atmosphere. Reilly’s habit of breaking chunks of text up with short standalone sentences is a trick that is used a few times too many and his use of italics and exclamation marks at particularly intense moments feels puerile at times, like reading a severely over-armoured version of a children’s reading primer.

So this is essentially a novel that works on about the same level of sophistication as the average G.I. Joe animated cartoon episode, only with added brutality and adult situations, or at least implications. Is that a bad thing? Reilly emphatically states that it is not in an afterword and if you’re one of the millions of readers who are going to buy his novel and spend a pleasant few days with it at the beach or while commuting, you’ll probably find yourself agreeing with him.

A slightly edited version of this review appeared in the Deccan Herald yesterday: http://www.deccanherald.com/content/221016/adrenalised-action.html

Religion?

2012-01-14T09:57:00.002+05:30

Here's a letter I just sent to the editor of The Hindu:

Sir,

Given the increased coverage given to film world celebrities I've long felt that the Religion column in The Hindu is redundant at best. On Friday the 13th, 2012, it also became morally repugnant. The column on this day carried the story of a guru who asks his disciple to name his pet cat Ego. When the cat becomes troublesome, he asks the disciple to leave it in a forest. The cat returns and the guru tells the disciple to put the cat in a sack and dump it in the forest. Here is the link containing this inane anecdote: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-miscellaneous/article2797290.ece

This story is a parable, but even so the form of the parable is unacceptable. A domestic animal, reared as a house pet does not have the skills to survive in a forest. Your notional guru is making his disciple practice animal abuse on the pretext of teaching him what is really a very trite lesson. I don't find this especially edifying; actually as someone who works in animal welfare on a voluntary basis, dealing regularly with people who raise animals in their homes and then dump them, helpless, on the streets, I find it disturbing that your writer thinks that a guru, a dispenser of wisdom, would not only condone but demand such behaviour. I am told that compassion is a keynote of most religions, but being an atheist myself I have no first-hand knowledge of this. Still, I request you to be a little more sensitive about the content of this column in future.

Regards,

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

THE GRIFTERS BY JIM THOMPSON

2012-01-05T11:28:00.002+05:30

Noir? There's got to be something darker than that to describe Thompson's books. Something that doesn't just imply the absence of colour or light but the impossibility of their ever having existed in the first place. I liked this one a lot, even better than The Getaway though perhaps not as much as The Killer Inside Me.

Roy Dillon, like most of Thompson's protagonists, is young, charming and crooked. The son of a similarly charming and crooked con woman, he's been living in Los Angeles and working a shrewd set of short-term con jobs alongside the facade of a respectable life. But one day, he picks the wrong patsy and receives a blow to the stomach that causes internal bleeding.

Vulnerable, he soon finds himself in a deadly love quadrilateral involving his seductive, self-serving mother Lilly, his equally alluring lover Myra, who has a few secrets he doesn't know yet and the innocent but scarred nurse, Carol.

He's put through the wringer in this novel and he thinks he's decided to go straight by the time it's all over. But things never quite work that way in a Thompson novel and the brutality of the final two twists in the tale left me astonished and a little breathless. I would love to imagine that Thompson was writing about some other species on some other planet; perhaps the most terrifying thing about his novels is that they are fiction with the stamp of truth.

Djinn & Miskatonic gig alert: Trend Slaughter Festival II, Bangalore

2011-12-19T10:00:00.000+05:30

2011-11-17T10:01:00.000+05:30

Like a litter of newborn mutant babies painfully slithering out from a womb, words surfaced: “Entropy… entropy… chaos… chaos… children… entropy… chaos…” Something about the inflection of the word “entropy” when it formed in his head after “children”, a subservient, almost worshipful tone.

Equal parts Ligotti, Lynch and his own special brainbrew weirdsplosh, my friend Suresh Subramaniam's deeply unsettling tale, 'Bharath's Toys' can now be read at Pratilipi.

The same issue contains my own story 'Empty Dreams'.

law

2011-11-01T22:21:00.001+05:30

Henceforth, nobody who has written and had published a novel (a) in the 60s and later that is (b) not a genre novel (crime, SF, fantasy, horror) should be permitted to share with the world a non-fictional essay or pronouncement on art, literature, politics, childlessness, childbirth, culture or clashes thereof, humanity, animals, insects, birds, reptiles, mammals, trees, flowers, fungi, fjords, airline ticket prices, aesthetics, atheism, religion, ravines, valleys, hills, mountains, poetry, prose, reality, fantasy, dream, memory or indeed anything at all whatsoever. It just makes them look stupid.

The genre writers can write what they like. No one will pay attention.

the awful truth

2011-10-28T12:25:00.002+05:30

I fear for my sanity.

The things I have seen would make a stronger man weep like a little child and scream like a banshee who has caught her thumb in a doorjamb.

It all began that fateful day when, immersed in my studies, I stumbled over the threshold of the Forbidden Manuscript room in my college, Miskatonic University. I wasn’t much for the musty old scrolls and tomes in there; structural engineering was more my line. But, having wandered in, something about the timeless, eerie atmosphere in the room made me linger. I strolled here and there, perusing hoary old alchemical almanacs and occult treatises, things with long, Latinate titles and illustrations of strange geometrical forms and demons with quaint little horns and tails.

Then, I stumbled upon the dreaded Necronomicon, that fabled compendium of the most unhallowed secrets of space and time, written by the Mad Arab, Abdul Al-Hazrad, he whose name is abomination to this very day. With my analytical mind and speed-reading techniques, I rapidly realized that even this text was only a gateway to another, more diabolical secret book; an Unholy of Unholies. The Book Of The Djinn.

I do not know what spark of madness had slumbered all these years in my rational, workaday mind, waiting to be fanned into a raging flame of obsessive insanity. Perhaps there was some flaw in the physical structure of my mind, perhaps some loathsome practitioner of dark arts lurked in some distant branch of my family tree, perhaps my mother dropped me on my head as an infant while laughing out loud upon perusing the horoscope section of the newspaper; I shall never know.

I do know that, from that moment, I could not rest until I had to read The Book Of The Djinn. Thus began a decade-long quest that took me from my native clime to the furthest reaches of the globe, from a cattle farm in Central Africa to an abandoned mine in Rhodesia, from the icy northern shores of Iceland to the Japan Sea and beyond.

Finally, I found the tome I sought in a cave high in the Himalayas, amidst barren rock and thick snow. Three chambers did I uncover, smashing stout doors of an indefinable substance to pass within, before at last I entered into the fourth, innermost chamber. Without pausing to explore the outer chambers, I read the long-sought-after book. I found therein a tale of the utmost brutality and strangeness, a tale of three beings, known collectively as The Djinn, although they had nothing in common with the Arabic imps who go by that name. These were three creatures of vast, cosmic evil whose very existence proved that the universe was little more than a largely empty bag of swirling molecules, governed ultimately by chaos but momentarily by three savage beings who stood atop the eldritch pantheon already revealed in the Necronomicon, lying dust-covered back there in dear old Miskatonic University.

They were: The Hitter Of Things; a massive, powerful creature who sought to remake the universe to the rhythm of his own percussive assaults. The Rumbler Beneath: a conniving, insidious behemoth who tortured the very fabric of reality with his subsonic imprecations. The Bellower Of Abomination, a colossal leviathan, crooning and ululating foul words of madness and ultimate disruption.

My fear and misgivings grew stronger and stronger as I learned how even Hasthur and Cthulhu had joined hands to chain these three terrible creatures in some fastness tucked away in a then-obscure corner of the universe, high atop a snow-capped mountain. A strange sense of déjà vu overcame me and as I compared the symbols in those ancient pages with the etchings on the doors I had so carelessly smashed through, I realized the awful truth.

I had released the Three Most Dread, unleashed them on an unsuspecting universe.

I fear for my sanity. I fear for my life. I know that they are sending their minions to deal with me even as I write these words.

I beg of you, heed my words and learn from them.

I beseech you, do not listen to their songs of madness and dissolution.

I implore you do not listen to

Djinn & Miskatonic.

Djinn & Miskatonic is:

Gautham Khandige: Vocals

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy: Bass

Siddharth Manoharan: Drums

We bring together fuzzy bass, dramatic vocals and kickass drumming to play songs that channel influences from Black Sabbath, Electric Wizard, Sleep, Hawkwind, Neu!, Soundgarden, Reverend Bizarre, Cathedral, St. Vitus, Melvins, The Tea Party, Joy Division, Eyehategod and more into a primitive, groovy, heavy, spacey assault of droning doomoid rock.

You have been warned.

I am zombie and so can you

2011-10-19T07:53:00.001+05:30

My band Djinn & Miskatonic's first gig is on monday.

Here's one of our songs: I Zombi

Recommended for fans of: slowness, heaviness, minimalism, Fulci, Lewton and La Noche del terror ciego

I could go there

2011-10-03T17:43:00.001+05:30

He was something like an emperor

Something like a hero

He chose a path; he was destroyed

He was something like a friend

It's lurking, a cleaner world

A neater world, sparse and silent

It's waiting to pounce

Pain measures the distance you travel

A single incision after a pitched chase

A moment's shuddering; release

Or die for days after falling

Terrible infinite surfaceless seconds

I wish I could use his remains

like the man in 'Rogue Male'

Make a weapon, fight the killer

Vengeance, a vain chance

I wish I could freeze that frame

I wish I could hold those seconds

Or days in my mouth

Feel cold salt dissolve on my tongue

It's a neater, cleaner place

Sparse, silent and free from despair

I could go there and be with you

If I only had the measure of pain

2011-10-03T15:28:00.001+05:30

'You bite into an apple and find a worm in it. You throw the apple away.

But what if the worm could make itself look like part of the apple?

What if the worm could make itself look like the apple?

What if the worm could make itself look like many apples, like an apple orchard, like a man walking through the orchard, plucking an apple, biting into it, finding a worm, discarding the apple?

What if it's worms all the way down?'

- from the Ouroboros apocrypha

2 quick thoughts tata see you later

2011-09-27T08:41:00.001+05:30

I am saving pennies (paisas actually) for when the inevitable Hard Case Crime/Mills & Boon crossover books to start appearing.

I also think it's dangerous to be mystical unless you see it as metaphorical in which case it's a lot safer than being reductionist.

I have to admit it.

2011-09-22T08:15:00.002+05:30

I was a hipster at age 7. 1984. The year that brought the world not Big Brother but Little (Peter) Pan; Michael 'Thriller' Jackson. India tended to lag behind Western pop culture by a few years at the time. Actually for more than a few years and not just at that time, but I grow dilatory. Michael Jackson cut through; all the big pop spectacles did, I now realise: Madonna, Live Aid, Sam Fox pin-ups and Bruce Springsteen bellowing 'Born In The USA' on an Indian stage in the 80s. We didn't have Pepsi and Coke but Michael Jackson cassettes and all sorts of bootleg merchandise started filtering through: dance moves discussed eagerly by teens after attending Sunday school in the Mennonite church next door, the kids in the street behind mine added a small alien element to their usual round of kirket heroes and Hindi film matinee idols, classmates humming Jackson tunes etc.

Even then I was convinced enough of the superiority of my own tastes (Beatles, Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Stones, all picked up from my parents' collections) and the utter despicability of anything that was so popular that people who didn't know from good music, who didn't care about what had come before, could latch on to this new sound and claim it and let it claim them.

I haven't grown up. I'm still that elitist 7-year old. I distrust the popular, look away from the spectacle, criticise the widely-acclaimed. A.R. Rahman the Mozart of Madras? Clearly you have never heard Mozart or been to Madras. And this (not at all) new rock that calls itself 'indie' and is perhaps not the mainstream but is certainly a mainstream fills me with instinctual contempt for all those whispy voices, those jangly guitars, mannerism as method, quirk as quorum. I listen to so many different kinds of music but I make a point to identify as a metalhead just to piss off the hipsters. I've become so hip I look down not on the mass audience but on other niche audiences.

cud

2011-09-18T21:10:00.000+05:30

The streets the lower jaw
Of a huge mouth
Gap-toothed, riddled with cavities
And unlikely, impractical and hideous
Caps and dentures
Of varying ages.
The upper jaw
Is already clamped shut.
The city chews you.

FADE TO BLONDE BY MAX PHILLIPS

2011-09-05T07:21:00.001+05:30

Whoever Max Phillips is* (I used to be one of those reviewers who did a lot of research, but that just meant my reviews wound up being regurgitated facts and subconscious plagiarism so now I make like Jack Spader and wait for a review to be dictated to me. By ghosts) he does a damned fine job of writing a vintage piece of noir, set in the seamy margins of the film business sometime in the 1950s, as far as I can tell from internal references. He goes straight for Chandler/Hammett territory and for the most part delivers a convincing period piece, right down to the somewhat rambling, episodic middle-acts that both the aforementioned masters often delivered, moving their sleuths from one seedy venue to another explosive confrontation to get the pieces in place for the final blow. Still, there are times when it's clear from certain mannerisms in the dialogue (especially the ploy of making 70% of a sentence? A question) that the writer has lived through the 2000s.

That's a minor complaint, because Phillips certainly delivers on most other fronts with a variety of colourful character, all sorts of sordid set-pieces and bursts of frantic action. There's a dame, and she's bad news for everyone around, especially herself. There's a hood, but we don't know everything about him until it's almost too late. There's a patsy, but the dame and the hood don't have his full measure. Various gangsters, crooks, lowlifes, minor functionaries, film world nobodies & used-to-be-somebodies and so forth prowl around the edges of the narrative darting in for quick bits of snappy dialogue and plot advancement. If anything, this novel is a bit too crowded for its 220 or so pages.

A bigger complaint is that the protagonist just doesn't add up. A failed screen writer and sometime-boxer, sometime bit-actor, he lived through some frightening moments in the second world war, but he's also well-read in a hard-bitten sort of way (he likes Chekhov and Stephen Crane, Hemingway tires him out). None of this really explains why he's such a fucking psycho. When anyone else would have been happy to get in a couple of solid punches and wind their opponent long enough to make a clean getaway, Corson will go for the jugular, every single time. Excessive violence is his only action mode and even in the tough circles he moves around in, he is known to be a bit of a wild card. Only, we're never given sufficient reasons why this is so.

So there you have it. Lots of good one-liners, a suitably sordid plot and a pretty good stab at old-fashioned noir entertainment through degradation even if there is an attempt to let a little sunshine through at the every end. Not something that I'll include in my list of all-time favourites, but by no means a bad way to spend your time and money.

*So I did my research afterwards, and he's one of the people running Hard Case crime. A bit cheeky to make one of his own books the second in the series, but at least it's obvious that this is an operation run by people who know a thing or two about their chosen area of operation. Also he gets huge points from me for this interview answer:

GM: Ray Corson, Mike Hammer, Phillip Marlowe and Jeff Markham are in a bar and get into a drunken brawl. Who’s going to win?
MP: Jules Maigret glares at them over his beer and they all slink out in shame.

FALL INTO TIME BY DOUGLAS LAIN

2011-08-29T07:39:00.000+05:30

I'd actually read two of these stories when they first appeared in online magazines. This is Lain's second book-form publication, the first was his debut short story collection, Last Week's Apocalypse. Lain's stories exist somewhere on the intersection of PKD, Kafka and a William Gibson who is more engaged with personal spaces and ideological possibilities than that funky data dance. I consider him one of the most exciting and intriguing writers I've encountered in the contemporary SF field, albeit one who does not press the buttons the bulk of genre fans expect their writers to. I'll try and weigh in with a more detailed version of this review sometime when it isn't a saturday evening and I don't have a bottle of excellent whiskey at hand.

*time elapses*

Right, it's Monday morning. You know, I used to spread drinking through the week, but lately I seem to get it all done in a few hours on Saturday evenings. Improved time management skills, I suppose.

I'd like to add a story-by-story review of this book which is easy because it only contains 4 stories.

The Last Apollo Mission: Lain parlays moon landing fraud theories and post-9/11 conspiracy paranoia into a story about a failed (or is she?) writer's intersection with a top-secret Kubrick project and the very bizarre aftermath. When you accept that everything's part of a conspiracy theory, what happens when conspiracies collide?

Resurfacing Billy: In a near-future where toxic waste is being dumped in public spaces and seeping out everywhere, a man tries to invent a miracle substance that will seal the garbage in for good. At the same time, the private franchise school he sends his son Billy to is attempting to find ways to curb Billy's supposedly anti-social streak, and is willing to use means that extend all the way up to lobotomy. Something about our increasingly counter-productive problem-solving strategies as a species, I think. The most emotionally poignant story in this set.

Alien Invasion/Coffee Cup Story: Dozens of SF fans love to hate this parody of the slice-of-life epiphany short story, spliced with an infuriatingly static alien invasion scenario. We expect too much from things, whether they're drunken conversations in bars or gleaming spacecraft hanging in the sky.

Chomsky And The Time Box: In a recent essay on Zizek, Lain says 'The only thing to expect from Zizek is that he challenges us to think and create new modes of Praxis. Not that we should stay at Zizek's level of political intervention, but rather that we should brutally test his ideas and criticize him so that we can discover to what degree the impossible is possible'. I think this story is of a piece with that sentiment, it's partly a commentary on our need to find gurus, using two such disparate figures as Chomsky and mushroom-mystic Terence McKenna to convey this point. It's also a hilarious, frustrating take on the history-changing time travel trope and there are one or two things here about our consumerist obsession with gadgets and gratification.

I may have made these stories seem like dry exercises in making points; in fact each of them has a richly textured narrative and is often downright hilarious. I'm a steadily-lapsing SF fan who finds that most current strands of the genre have very little to do with his own futuristic or literary interests. Lain is the rare writer who addresses my increasing need to read SF that engages with the currents that are really shaping our world in a mode that owes more to the 70s New Wave, for instance, than to Crichton-envy. Well done!

2011-08-23T10:56:00.001+05:30

A newish story I wrote: http://unboxedwriters.com/2011/08/fade-out/

romans durs, anyone?

2011-08-19T07:58:00.000+05:30

Do you know any fans of Simenon's non-Maigret books? I'd like to put together a site/community dedicated to these books as a counterpart to the excellent Maigret site at trussel.com/f_maig

killing the alien

2011-08-17T10:03:00.001+05:30

Mrs. Radcliffe sought to tame the wild Gothic, tether it to reason and human nature. Leaving a back door for the restitution of strangeness and transgression depending on your paradigm of reason, human nature and reality.

Messers Burton & Gaiman have, cumulatively (they both have individual works or sequences that do not do this; the pop-cultural end-result is what I am getting at here) done much more damage to the power of such imagery to evoke the dark and numinous than Radcliffe or Reeve ever did. Through them, the trappings of Gothic are no longer barbaric, menacing or strange; Death is just a pale girl in black who knows all about you and loves you.

The work of transforming the Gothic into the psychological novel, the novel of manners, the detective novel and the science fiction novel was creative. The work of transforming the dark and alien into the safe, familiar and domestic is far more pernicious; instead of true disruption we are led to a universe where everything mirrors everything else.

2011-08-16T15:45:00.000+05:30

Somehow, macabre is the new twee.

2011-08-14T14:24:00.002+05:30

Weird fiction's primal duty is to fuck [alternative word: debauch] your brain and kiss your sense of wonder.
- W.H. Pugmire

2011-08-10T11:38:00.000+05:30

'Where is the writer,' he began, 'who is unstained by any habits of the human, who would be the ideal of everything alien to living, and whose own eccentricity, in its darkest phase, would turn in on itself to form increasingly more complex patterns of strangeness? Where is the writer who has remained his entire life in some remote dream that he inhabited from his day of birth, if not long before?'

- Thomas Ligotti, 'The Journal Of J.P. Drapeau '

a political tout

2011-08-09T11:22:00.001+05:30

China Mieville, responding to a reader who asked if he would ever be willing to write something that did not 'tout' his 'Liberal politics':

The way I see the world is, among other things but very importantly, a political one, and I write fiction from where I see the world. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the concerns, interests, textures and tractions that inform the fiction are, to various degrees recognizably, related to my politics. Just as they are with many other writers, of all kinds of varying positions, for whom politics are important.

So when you ask if I’m ‘willing to write anything that doesn’t tout’ my own position, how I have to interpret that is ‘Are you willing to write a book that is not written from a position of seeing the world the way you see the world?’ To which, the answer, of course, has to be No. How could I possibly do so? I don’t want to do so, either, even if I could, which I cannot. The things you say you like in the books come from the same place of which the politics are an inextricable component. I don’t say they’re coterminous – but they are inextricable in my head, and I don’t want to extricate them.

From this thread on goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/566606-ask-china-mi-ville?format=html&page=1

JUNIPER TIME BY KATE WILHELM

2011-08-06T23:15:00.000+05:30

Mostly very good, even if, purely as extrapolation, a lot of plot elements haven't held up. A very canny and thoughtful derailment of a carefully built-up first contact motif set against a near future world where international conflict and ecological crisis prevail.

Where the novel failed for me, right at the eleventh hour, was in the excessively expository manner in which the conflicts and resolutions of the last 20 pages are played out, all tell and no show. Wilhelm has points to make about human motivation, the dehumanising nature of obsession, our pathetic management of the environment, our addiction to one-upmanship and our counter-productive attachment to seeing things as binaries. She also creates at least one fascinating central character; but he is not sympathetic, and one sympathetic character; but she is too good to be true. The rest of the characters are like stock figures in a passion play. Despite which there is some very beautiful writing that displays an admirable sense of place and grasp of metaphor.

A wise book, but not enough of a novel. By way of contrast, see Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe Of Heaven, which exemplifies why John Clute describes Le Guin as a 'wise teller of tales'.

THE SKULL OF TRUTH BY BRUCE COVILLE

2011-08-05T17:11:00.001+05:30

Good children's books deserve to be read by adults as well. If it's really good, the story will appeal to readers of any age. If it's downright excellent, it can re-awaken the child within for the space it takes to read the book. Maybe it's because I went to a pre-school run on the system of Maria Montessori, whose watchword was 'follow the child', but I can't help but see that as a beneficial exercise.

Bruce Coville is a prolific American writer of fiction for children whom I first discovered in my 20s, with the 'My Teacher Is An Alien' books. I was impressed by how real and believable his characters are, children, grown-ups and aliens and how well his imagination conjures up situations and settings that invoke a sense of wonder. I also noted how he handles larger messages and themes in a way that's not preachy or intrusive and is alive to the many sides of any given issue. Most of all, I was taken by Coville's obvious joy in the art of storytelling.

In this book, Coville tackles one of the big issues any fictioneer has to grapple with at some point: truth. When Charles Egglestone stumbles into a mysterious shop and winds up shoplifting a talking skull, he finds that the skull's magical powers have made it impossible for him to lie anymore. At first, disaster follows, because the truth is not always the convenient or even the right thing to blurt out. Gradually, he gains a deeper, richer sense of what truth is all about, how it can be found both in fact and fiction and how it can be used for good, although it is in itself morally neutral. I was particularly glad that Coville keeps that last point very clearly in sight. Truthfulness isn't a magic key to virtue - it's still up to us to keep our eyes open and work out the ethics of everything we do. I can think of vast tomes written for a putatively grown-up audience that miss this point.

That exposition of the book's themes probably sounds dry. But this book isn't. It's hilarious, poignant and inventive, and manages to invoke a character from Big Bill Shakespeare's plays - see if you can guess which one - and give him a back- and front-story, if I can put it that way, which is as resonant and memorable as anything from the Bard's plays. I get a real kick out of a piece of fiction that can engage with one of the classics and emerge enriched rather than simply bested by the experience, and the former is certainly the case here. (Neil Gaiman has done this sort of thing well at points in his career - Sandman for instance - and not so well at other points - the Beowulf film). If I had a child between the ages of 7 and 11 at my disposal, I would entreat him or her to read this book. But since I don't, I'm just as happy to have had the chance to read it myself.

2011-07-30T21:44:00.002+05:30

It's only natural for the sane man to sublimate his animal response to the horrors of the waking world into something manageable, such as art.

- Laird Barron

blocked

2011-07-27T14:06:00.001+05:30

story wavers
words shimmer
i reach but cannot grip

sense remains
sense prevails
i give up

words go back in single file
along the bleak marches
all the way back into
that dark country
of the unimagined

2011-06-24T15:28:00.006+05:30

'..beauty counts. It is the lever by which the horror and violence of existence is revealed.'

- Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Five Equally Plausible Rules of Good Writing

2011-06-18T14:18:00.001+05:30

Another reply to another post by Ian Sales:

Leave enough room in your prose for the ambiguity that recruits the reader's imagination as a willing collaborator.
Sometimes, it's best if you let the reader map out that last ramification of the ideas in the story.
Leave enough room in the plot for the reader to have something to ponder over later.
Get the details right (and that means research).
The resolution needs to be a natural consequence of your intentions in writing the story.

All-Authoress July

2011-06-16T14:28:00.000+05:30

I haven't really been following Ian Sales' SF Mistressworks project, because I haven't really been keeping up with the SF blogsphere but he makes some good points here.

He plans to only read books by women in July and considering the fact that my own reading is dominated by male authors I feel I could definitely gain by following suit. I read about 4 to 5 books a month so here is a list of authors by whom I have one or more unread books that could make it into next month's reading list:

Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Jeanette Winterson
Sarah Hall
Angela Carter
Jane Yolen
CJ Cherryh
Minette Walters

That's by no means a comprehensive list, but it covers several books that I was planning to read soon anyway. In every case I've already read something by this author, so maybe I should also add a couple of new discoveries to the mix, but here's the shortlist of authors I will be choosing from.

The Very Slow Time Machine by Ian Watson

2011-06-16T14:00:00.000+05:30

This book is full of the sort of mind-bending ideas and narrative experiments that I like best in my science fiction - Watson is very much writing in a British SF tradition, that of Brian Aldiss and JG Ballard I'd say, but his vision is his own. Much as I loved the caliber of Watson's conceits (a mind-meld with an entity within a black hole whose idea of reality is an inversion of our own, a visit to an Earth where impermeable barriers divide various regions along meridional lines, a sojourn among aliens who extend further in time than we do - and what exactly that could mean - and more) and his formal freedom (several of these stories do not deliver conventional narratives but almost fragmentary vignettes), I disliked aspects of his treatment of gender and race. Most female characters are sexualised and people are often characterised a little too strongly according to race or ethnicity. Still a definite classic for all that, and easily goes into my list of favourite SF short story collections. Will be looking out for the new one Ian Whates is publishing.

2011-06-14T13:44:00.001+05:30

Reading the scathing user-submitted reviews of Vinyan on IMDB, all written by self-proclaimed horror fans, I suspect that there is something fundamentally different by what I mean when I identify as a horror fan (and sometimes writer) and what these people are talking about.

Vinyan doesn't deal in physical evisceration or torture as its primary currency; it holds back on the gore until circumstances dictate that it cannot be avoided any longer; it grants meaning and narrative weight to the act of gutting a human being, a weight that films like the Saw franchise fail to convey.

Instead of serving as a sort of Sadeopedia, it deals with terrible consequences of loss and obsession, following a couple who are perhaps trying to expiate their own sense of guilt over a lost child, as they journey to the heart of their own particular darkness.

There is a supernatural element: a suggestion that a vinyan, the troubled spirit of one who dies a bad death, may exist even before such a death. Are the couple in this film being drawn into their own darkest hours by the spirit of a lost child or by some sort of unleashed anguish from their own dark destinies?

The supernatural suggestion is weighed against an evocative depiction of the unsettling, perspective-upsetting consequences of strong, perhaps pathological, emotion.

Everyone here has survived a terrible catastrophe; at least, they are all still alive. But it is unclear if their sanity and humanity has survived.

Seeds are sown, a terrible harvest is reaped. We are left to piece together whether it was human nature or the spirit world, or both, that intervened.

I think it's a horror film, using the term 'horror' as a shorthand for any narrative that seeks to unsettle us by exploring the darker potential inherent in things natural and supernatural. I also think it's a pretty good horror film.

United Beards of India

2011-06-09T10:40:00.000+05:30

Dylanish

2011-05-25T13:02:00.001+05:30

In a recent blog entry, M. John Harrison lists what one assumes are his favourite Dylan songs. Here's a YouTube playlist featuring all of them in cover versions for reasons that will forever alienate hardcore Dylan fans. Cheers.

Ticket Of Leave (a.k.a. The Widow) by Georges Simenon

2011-05-23T07:51:00.001+05:30

'It was odd: there were forty passengers, and only one of them, the widow Couderc, looked at the man any differently than you would have looked at just anybody.The rest were placid and quiet, as it might be cows in a meadow watching a wolf browsing in their midst without the least astonishment.'

'Twice, and twice only, in the whole of his life, had he known this innocent peace, once when he'd been ill and had ceased to consider school a reality; then again here, this very morning, as he strode towards the village and waited with the gossips behind the butcher's van...'

Writing news

2011-05-18T09:14:00.000+05:30

My story 'Dancer of the Dying' has been accepted for inclusion in Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities, an anthology of Lovecraftian stories. It's Lovecraftian in the sense that it takes cues from 'The Music Of Erich Zann' and 'The Festival' but the nightmare city in question is, of course, Bangalore.

bitter

2011-05-12T10:11:00.000+05:30

survive

2011-05-11T08:19:00.000+05:30

'Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.

It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity.'

'...that thing that's taken refuge there in that zinc bucket, without a wife, a career, a conapt, or money or the possibility of encountering any of these, still persists. For reasons unknown to me its stake in existence is greater than mine.'

'a funny world, kid'

2011-05-09T07:18:00.000+05:30

'We're living in a funny world kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, know what I mean? If we had all we wanted to eat, we'd eat too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry. That's the way I understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments I've heard.'

- Jim Thompson, 'The Killer Inside Me'

The Whole Wide World (1996)

2011-04-28T08:00:00.001+05:30

Robert E Howard was long my least favourite of the Big Three weird writers, as a person. While Lovecraft shared his racism, he was also a reclusive, cat-loving, atheistic ice-cream eater, all qualities I can relate to. Clark Ashton Smith always seemed the most fully-rounded personality of the three and the one with the most liberal, sensible views on life. Howard came across as a racist social misfit who wrote the stories he did as a sort of wish-fulfillment for the life of machismo that he longed for but was born too late to have. I've actually read a bit about his life, including extensive excerpts from Novalyne Price's memoirs, but this movie finally put it all in perspective for me. It doesn't soft-pedal anything except the racism, which is completely side-stepped. Howard is shown as a dreamer, someone whose stories were as much the product of a powerful imagination as they were of a deeply unfulfilled personality. His relationship with his mother is there in all its obsessive dimension, as is his penchant for ungainly macho posturing. Despite all this, we see a sensitive, intelligent man who was driven driven: both by personal demons, demons that eventually triumphed, and by something that conforms more to the classical concept of the genius; a sort of tutelary spirit whispering wondrous yarns into his inner ear. The movie also bypasses the question of poverty - the Howards' finances were a major concern for REH and his depression over delayed payments for his stories contributed in large measure to his depression. Still, this was a wonderful experience and a take on REH that feels right in the context of what I can conclude about the man from his fiction.You don't need to like the authors you read, but I think I have a better, more sympathetic sense of Howard the man today.

2011-04-22T13:12:00.000+05:30

Presenting a rough cut of a song by my new side-project, Djinn & Miskatonic: Flight Of Sand. The final version will include distortion on the bass (my battery died just before this recording) and vocals! And fewer mistakes!!

Maigret's Pickpocket by Georges Simenon

2011-04-21T10:06:00.003+05:30

A reviewer on goodreads.com described this book as comfort food, and noted the civilized way in which Maigret goes about solving his mystery. That makes it seem as if this is something on the lines of an Agatha Christie novel, which strikes me as a very misleading notion. However, it also illuminates a difference between Simenon's Franco-Belgian noir and the American version: there's far less violence in Simenon's Maigret novels. Maigret doesn't go around getting into brawls, ambushes and gunfights the way Marlow or the Continental Op do.

You could almost describe the set-up as a police procedural; except that Maigret's procedure is anything but. He generally approaches a case obliquely, famously drawing no conclusions and forming no theories, almost sleepwalking through routine interrogations and noting each new piece of data from the experts with an almost distracted air. He takes time out for snacks, glasses of beer or wine, little domestic interludes with his wife. His deductions only come in at the very end, once he has completely immersed himself in the mystery to the point of outward stasis. He is informed by a deep, not un-compassionate sense of human frailty and a professional policeman's knowledge of all the twisted, brutal and pathetic forms that frailty can take; it's a sensitive clinician's approach, a description which can be applied to Simenon's own in these novels as well as his non-Maigret works. In the process we are brought face-to-face with some of the darkest currents of human nature, with acts of betrayal and desperation that are more shocking for being uncovered in such a seemingly matter-of-fact way. It isn't a superior approach to that of Chandler/Hammett , but an equally effective one, and one that has more in common with their work than that of those whom I'd generally describe as writers of cozy mysteries.

This novel is no exception; it is superbly constructed, with Maigret's wallet being pick-pocketed on a bus - only to be returned intact with a note requesting him to meet the pickpocket. The fellow turns out to be a young aspiring scriptwriter who lives alone with his wife in a flat. His wife has been dead for a few days, shot in the head. The man insists he is innocent and turns to Maigret for help. What follows is a descent into a specific microcosm - the world of somewhat shifty financiers, wannabe stars and creative hacks of various kinds who exist at the peripheries of the film world, looking out for their big break. Outwardly, Maigret is having a pleasant time of it, sitting and eavesdropping on his suspects in a cozy restaurant with superb food, sharing fine beer with one suspect and so on.

But I am convinced that any reader with a little discernment will notice the darker currents running beneath this calm surface, the little side-lights into the various characters' own individual hells, the tiny acts of betrayal and desperation, calculation and surmise that make up their daily lives, and finally the revelation of the crime itself, domestic certainly, but not cozy by any means. Even more significant than Maigret's identification of the culprit is his insight in the last page - asked if the culprit should face the courts or be treated as a psychiatric case, Maigret suggests the courts - not because he is convinced of the murderer's mental soundness so much as because he knows that that is where the person in question will be able to play out the sort of role they would be most comfortable with. That's a subtle point, one that neither justifies nor condemns but merely displays the stark insight that sets the Maigret novels apart.

2011-04-12T11:02:00.003+05:30

What appeals to me most are not stories of horror but stories of awe -- even if that awe emanates from the dark. Horror writing allows me to explore that dark ineffableness, and try to then convey it to the rational world.
- Simon Strantzas

my recent forays into the world of trash horror

2011-04-12T11:01:00.004+05:30

Spawn by Shaun Hutson

Over the last few years, I have been reading some of the finest horror literature in the world, delving deep into the British ghost story masters James and Le Fanu, the spritualist-horror masterpieces of Machen and Blackwood, the darker American visions of Bierce, Chambers and that dark prince of the macabre, Poe, the early 20th-century efflorescence helmed by talents like Lovecraft, Smith and Howard and of course the current masters of the form such as Ligotti and Campbell as well as emerging giants like Barron and Pugmire.

And now I've read Shaun Hutson.

This isn't the worst thing ever - writers like Richard Laymon and the authors of a hundred disposable splatter paperbacks from the 80s boom were as bad and often worse - but it's not good by any means. The writing is amateurish and in need of editing, the plot is a mish-mash of cliches and poor taste, the characters are cardboard cut-outs and there's no real moment of dark epiphany, just a series of rather lowbrow gross-outs that culminate in the usual predictable twist ending.

For all that, I'm giving this a two-star rating simply because of its honesty - Hutson clearly set out to write exactly the kind of novel that he wound up writing. It's trash, but at least it's honest trash and nothing - the title, the blurb, the cover art or what you can glean by scanning the first few pages in a bookstore - pretends otherwise.

The House Of Doors by Brian Lumley

Lovecraftian robes, MacLeanian heart.

I'd vaguely heard of Lumley and his never-ending Necroscope series as well as his Lovecraftian fiction. What I'd heard of the former didn't exactly have me rushing to check out the latter, but I decided to finally sample something by him and this novel seemed like a good place to start as I wanted something outside of the Necroscope series to start with.

The novel is billed as horror, but really, it's closer to science fiction, and even closer to a plan and simple action thriller. Lumley certainly has a powerful if raw imagination; much of the rest is simply undercooked or half-baked. The appearance of a weird castle in a small Scottish town is certainly a promising set-up, and when we finally enter this strange place some of the imagery Lumley spins is suitably awesome, if couched in somewhat less than deathless prose. But the story begins to bog down with its characters; the hero is somewhat interesting in that he possesses an unusual ability to enter into a sort of empathetic rapport that lets him fathom how anything mechanical works; he is also dying of a fatal disease. Beyond that, however, he remains as much of a cipher as the remaining stock characters; a heavy-handed, arrogant politician, a tough secret agent with bodily and mental scars, a claustrophobic Frenchman, a fanatical occult investigator, a cheap hoodlum, an abusive drunkard and a woman. The woman's role is of course defined by her gender and driven by sexuality; to do otherwise would apparently defeat Lumley's understanding of storytelling.

The protagonist, the somewhat awkwardly named Sith of Thone, quickly turns out not be a truly cosmic threat but the sort of flawed, easily-understood and ultimately defeatable bogeyman of a million alien-invasion scenarios. The strange realms that the humans enter into via the many nestled Houses Of Doors turn out to have more in common with the old game show, The Crystal Maze than with, say, the dream realms of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith's many magical worlds.

Ultimately, this novel doesn't hinge on a sense of horror or on its somewhat stock science fictional tropes; it's a thriller, an adventure yarn of victory against all odds, one that has more in common with the potboilers of Alistair MacLean than anything else. Although leaps of imagination sometimes caught at the edges of the awe mechanism in this reader's mind, the plodding prose, and leaden plot machinations drain those few moments of wonder of their charm and strangeness. It's not a bad entertainment, but it isn't something that needed to have been called a horror novel at all, at heart.

Baal by Robert R. MacCammon

Works well enough on its own terms; jettison expectations of originality and depth and settle for a fast-moving evil-messiah tale with many gore set pieces and a suitably vile villain and you'll be fine. Somewhat superficial research ensured that I caught all the resonances and hints quite early on, as well as a few factual errors here and there. The prose is functional but occasionally aspires to more; sometimes it gets there. Not at all bad for a first novel. But it's more gross and sickening than awe-inspiring; McCammon fails to exploit the full potential of this tale with his emphasis on viscera and profanity.

Can you tell that I'm starting to get tired of this stuff? That last review was really perfunctory.

Signs Of Chaos

2011-03-31T07:51:00.000+05:30

My band Bevar Sea's next show. If you're in Bangalore this weekend, drop by.

Djinn & Miskatonic

2011-03-29T07:29:00.001+05:30

It was the proudest day of my life
When my old father showed me the letter
With the Massachusetts postmark
He said ‘Son you’re in!’
We danced around like two idiots
What else was I to do?
My whole my life my father wanted
Me to study in Miskatonic U!

Djinn and Miskatonic! Journey supersonic!
On black leathery wings, my heart sings!
Djinn and shoggoth! Can auld acquaintance be forgot?
When I get my library card I’ll learn about all those eldritch things!

I’m not like the other wizards
Unprepared idiots dying in herds
I’ve got my own magical security
A bottle djinn from old Araby
I broke the seal of Solomon
And now I command Norman
Djinn-in-waiting, faithful slave
To protect me from an early grave

Djinn and Miskatonic! Visions chthonic!
Dreaded enemy, can you beat Norman and me?
Djinn versus Mi-Go, what a way for him to go,
Now I’m taking odds against the Elder Gods

When things started to unravel, I thought I’d take a break and travel
Fell in with a girl called Cassilda, but she was too much drama
She left me in the lurch, With a dead baby in a church
I tried to re-animate the corpse, but I was arrested by the cops
Sitting there in a prison cell I rubbed that magic lamp like hell
Finally the genie re-appeared, Worse for wear as I had feared
But he broke me out of stir, then left me in a shoggoth fur
By the banks of that ancient river, strong drink poisoning my liver

Djinn & Miskatonic, vodka supersonic
You can’t outsmart the old ones, It just can’t be done
Whiskey and regret, now I try to forget
What the Mi-go sings, and the sound of leathery wings…

there is a need here, but is it the need to tell a story?

2011-03-27T07:36:00.000+05:30

Comments from an aspiring writers' forum:

'I am creating my own species...'

'I have created my own world but at present I only explore a small portion of it...'

'I don't have children but I feel like my characters are my children...'

'I love escaping to my world and my characters and I hope my readers will too...'

'Memento Mori' by Samuel Menashe

2011-03-25T15:08:00.002+05:30

this skull instructs

me now to probe

the socket bone

around my eyes

to test the nose

bone underlies

to hold my breath

to make no bones

about the dead

2011-03-24T16:49:00.001+05:30

Incorruptible because already completely debased on a level far more fundamental than monetary honesty.

THE NAMELESS BY RAMSEY CAMPBELL

2011-03-24T11:30:00.002+05:30

I've never been altogether satisfied with the few novels by Ramsey Campbell that I've read. He tends to be subtle to the point of reticence, a quality which can work within the concentrated span of a short story, and often does, but which seems to lead to horror novels that shield themselves from the consequences of their own central conceits. I'm not a gore-hound, but I do like a build-up of weird atmosphere and if possible a truly bizarre irruption of the numinous into a horror story. That's probably why I like writers like Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron and W.H. Pugmire, all of whom are masters of atmosphere, weirdness and outré imagery in their own diverse ways.

Campbell is sort of the flagbearer of modern British horror; he is also a devotee of Lovecraft, even a member of the extended Lovecraft Circle through his early correspondence with August Derleth, who published a 15-year-old Campbell's first essays at horror, written in a thoroughly Lovecraftian mode. As such, Campbell can be seen as heir to the two most significant strands of Anglophone horror - the tale of cosmic terror as epitomised by H.P. Lovecraft's work and the more inward-looking, supernaturalist horror of vintage practitioners from the British Isles, such as Algernon Blackwood or Arthur Machen.

And the novel at hand has elements of both; there is an early encounter with a spiritualist who provides important clues, and there are run-ins with the world of occult societies later on. But Campbell also draws on the cosmic forces Lovecraft invokes, as well as the many tutelary entities and nameless cults that gravitate to them. He does this in a manner that is profoundly more assured than his earlier Mythos fiction - he does not attempt to use any of the paraphernalia of Yog-Sothothery or tie his terrors in with Lovecraft's. But there is a broadening of scale towards the end of the novel that definitely owes something to the Lovecraftian vision.

Campbell relates his cults and forces to the currents of his times, however, tying them in with the murder cults of drugged-up hippies, referring directly to the Manson family and to the extended new-age cults of the modern western world. So far, so good.

Campbell also takes the time to build a foreground narrative that is grounded in well-rounded, realistic characters. He also has a knack for describing cityscapes and passing scenery with original, sharp and memorable metaphors; one wishes that he was just as inventive and captivating when it came to describing the the weird stuff, the business we're here for. Not that he is bad at all sustaining and ever so slowly building an atmosphere of understated foreboding, but part of the problem we have here is what I've noted in works by SF and fantasy writers who seem to want to normalise toward some sort of mix of either airport thriller style or lit-fic. It's probably laudable to bring in the ice-pick similes of the Booker set and the character focus of the patented page-turner if this helps raise the specific generic values of the novel, and it does to an extent. But in the process, something of the impact of the horrific core of this novel is deferred and even diluted, although not as badly as in the previous novels I've read by Campbell. But everytime he captures a vista glimpsed down a city street or out of a moving tale with a limpid phrase, I can't help but wish that he had expended a little more stylistic fireworks on the strange entities, cultists and rituals that we occasionally catch up with in between all the well-framed character development. Fortunately, the development of the foreground story always drives the plot forwards, so we do get to the horrific bits eventually. And we do get a good conclusion - some truly terrifying and cosmic intimations, a resolution that is redemptive and upsetting at the same time and an ending that wraps up without explaining more than is needed (this is a key factor in horror, where any amount of imagery is fine, but too much explanation can kill the magic).

With all the reservations I've expressed, I found this novel gripping precisely because Campbell made me care about the characters; but I was left with perhaps less of a feeling of having been brought face to face with a vision of true strangeness and threat than I would have wished. I would have been glad to learn a little more about the demented philosophy of the nameless, to spend a little more time in their founder's company, to have a little more of a glimpse of the darker power that the cult served, but Campbell only gives us access to just as much as is needed to keep the foreground narrative on track. Still, what there is, is effective and disturbing, so all in all mark this one up as a definite win for Campbell.

I do have one strong objection though; at one point, Campbell shows us a female character stripping down to her underwear; sure enough, she is marked for destruction. In a certain kind of storytelling, a woman's nakedness is always a precursor to her extinction. This is such a cliche of the worst kind of schlock that I'm a little taken aback Campbell didn't even realise what he was doing here.

I'd also like to highlight how well Campbell uses an urban setting to serve as a locus of horror, with the crowds, noise and pockets of urban blight found in a big city all contributing to create a nurturing environment for evil.

In 1999, a Spanish film entitled Los Sin Nombre was made as a partial adaptation of this novel; I'll be reviewing that in my next update.

Bevar Sea @ Trendslaughter 2011

2011-03-22T08:29:00.002+05:30

Second show. Seemed to go well.

That's me in the baby-blue The Beatles t-shirt.

Our setlist:

The Smiler
God's Wounds
Abishtu
Into The Void (Black Sabbath cover)
Mono Gnome
Green Machine (Kyuss Cover)
Universal Sleeper

We played for about an hour. The other bands were a young thrash act called Culminant, Gorified, the goregrind band, veteran doom-deathers Dying Embrace and Orator, a death/thrash band from Bangladesh.

2011-03-18T07:30:00.002+05:30

Sing, oh muse, and the days when she does. When words typed across across a glowing screen start becoming people, places, events, when whispers in my head start start to sing and characters emerge from the mist with faces and histories and voices. When the heat is white and casts light across pages that line themselves up to be written. These days are a part of the reason why.

2011-03-17T14:41:00.000+05:30

Horror is the darkness that shines through the cracks. It is a sacred form of awe. It lives in the lizard that lives within all of us.

- Laird Barron

2011-03-16T15:17:00.000+05:30

This is probably not as big a deal as it felt like when I first heard of it, but this story got a mention here. I'm not sure how many horror stories were published last year, but, in short, this means mine was somewhere in the top 600 or so, although not really in the top 100 or 50 or 10.

2011-03-16T08:41:00.001+05:30

Here's something that caught my eye in an interview with horror writer John Langan:

4. As an academic, what are your thoughts on teaching writing, and learning how to write: do you believe it's something that is taught, something that is just there, or something else?

I guess I’d have to say, “Yes.” There’s no denying that some people have that facility with language and storytelling that we stuff under the name talent. At the same time, no matter that raw ability, there’s always more that can be done to refine it, not to mention, to develop the discipline required to sit down at the page every day until the story or poem is done.

A lot of this, I’m absolutely certain, has to do with how much and how well you’ve read. We learn through imitation, and if you have that nascent ability with language and storytelling (which I suspect is far more widespread than we might think), then you want to allow yourself the maximum number of examples to learn from. I know that writing workshops are very popular and certainly, they can be useful, but I’d suggest that it may be as, if not more, useful for a beginning writer to engage in a program of intensive reading, take a year or two and just soak yourself in the written word.

This is a part of what I was trying to articulate in a recent rambling, inchoate mass of words that was posted on this blog. A lot of what seems to have gone wrong with the IWE stuff (there, I've used the dreaded acronym of doom - happy, Sridala?) is not the anxiety of influence but the narrowness of it. A little talent, less immersion in what the great and not-so-great writers of the past and present have done, predictably under-cooked results.

A commenter noted that I used the term 'kitsch' in various versions all over my earlier wordsplurge. And it's an important part of my point too. The less you delve into the medium you want to be a part of , the less of a yardstick you have. Jeffrey Archer only seems great until you read John Buchan. The Harry Potter books only seem dazzlingly different and original until you've tried Earthsea, Books Of Magic and the odd Jane Yolen novel. That terrible Year Of The Tiger book I reviewed last year only seems like literature until you've read some Atwood or Nabokov. Kitsch has its place (I am told) but until you also have an understanding of genuine artistry and find a permanent place for it in our aspirations and affections, no amount of ironic or faux-naive posing will change the fact that you have no taste.

I failed

2011-03-10T15:57:00.001+05:30

I bought 5 books; two novels by Andrei Makine, a short story collection by Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's letters and The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve.

It's still a reduction from previous months. But not good enough.

India Reading?

2011-03-10T09:32:00.003+05:30

(Dislaimer: I'm ignoring the question of language here. Much of what I've said uses western reference points - which have undoubtedly had a significant impact on indigenous trends (in much the same way as a certain kind of modern Hinduism often strikes me as Christianity in polytheist drag) and nearly all of what I say about books and the people who read and write them is confined to what I've seen in India's Anglosphere, and in some cases, mentioned in the text, to my own family. There's a valid case to be made for the contention that there is much more interesting and nutritional material to be found in vernacular literature, and most of the Indian fiction that I've really liked has tended to be translated from some local language. That's a different topic, one that I'm not addressing here. )

Yesterday, one of the dailies featured a write-up about Indian author who has just had a book published . One of those puff pieces that sit halfway between free PR and unpaid advertising, it included a soundbite from the lady in question about how the home-grown mystery genre is gaining ground in the Indian market. She opined that this was good because it shows 'a democratization of reading'.

This got me thinking about an overseas friend's contention that readers in India are by and large more discerning and intelligent in their choices than their counterparts in several Anglophone nations, particularly the USA. And it's true that Indians above a certain age and of a certain background tend to be better-versed than many in authors like Wodehouse or Saki, fine writers and superb craftsmen in their chosen registers but a trifle obscure elsewhere. I know that educated Indians of my grandfather's generation and to an extent the generation that followed them, tended to have a certain grounding in the classics with an emphasis on the sort of thing a late Victorian or Edwardian would have liked. But I can really only write about people from my own family, so that's what I'll do now

People of that generation used to read poetry. Both my grandfathers knew and enjoyed a bit of Kipling, Wordsworth and Byron and my more literary paternal grandfather knew works by Blake, Housman, Keats, Shelley, Arnold - but also Elliot and Auden. Learning poems 'by heart' continued to be a regular practice when I was sent to school, and both my grandfathers could recite a few poems in part or whole, even though my maternal grandfather was not really what you'd call bookish.

As I've said, they read 'the classics' - some Dickens and Shakespeare at the very least.Once, when I'd broken a leg as a boy, my paternal grandfather gave me a copy of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (in a lovely old Penguin cream-and-orange edition) to help me through my convalescence. Another gift was Dickens' 'Nicholas Nickelby', perhaps not Dickens' finest work but a good place for a young boy to start. My stepfather who recently passed away once played the role of Portia in 'The Merchant Of Venice' in a school production. Just a few days before his passing my mother heard him reciting some of Portia's speeches from the court scene - not the famous one about mercy, but instead Portia going into Iron Man mode with the 'Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh...' speech. (It's a different matter that this speech may have had deeper resonances with some of the circumstances that surrounded his death - that's a story for another day and for another writer, possibly one channeling the spirit of Simenon.) They read popular fiction too - John Buchan, Rider Haggard, Edgar Wallace. Mysteries were always popular - Conan Doyle and later Agatha Christie.

But it's somewhere in my father's generation that a certain drift started to happen, although it's by no means universal or uniform; a lot depended on whether you were raised in a city or not, in a rich or nearly rich home or a more humble one. The summer of love had its influence on Indian youth culture as well, probably aided by the presence of actual hippies coming to our shores in search of enlightenment and really good ganja. Both my parents listened to a fair bit of rock n' roll in their youth - The Beatles, The Stones, Elvis. My mother tended more to folk acts like Baez, Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary, singer-songwriter types like Carole King and James Taylor, while my father liked a lot of jazz and even a little Hendrix and Deep Purple, although he also loves classical music, both Indian and Western. Rebellion against parental tastes in music may have also contributed to literary rebellion. So this was when a lot of Camus, Sartre, De Beauvoir began to be read by a certain class of youth with intellectual aspirations.

The 70s brought in disco, which visually and aurally meshed very well with the drive towards kitsch in Indian popular culture and cast a shadow over Indian cinema music and costumes which may still be seen in evidence, either in overtly retro outings or in the general pulse and flash of Bollywood's ubiquitous dance sequences. Even high culture was turned over to the custodianship of Anant Pai and his very kitschy Amar Chitra Katha comics, an abdication of cultural authority from the family or even the priesthood to the engines of mass media that was further consolidated by Ramanand Sagar's execrable television adaptation of the 'Ramayana' in the 80s, an event that sparked off the trend for Hindu families to gather around their television on a sunday morning, when these kinds of serials are aired, and light incense and make offerings before the television set before sitting down to get their theistic fix. No prizes for guessing the only real deity in that scenario (hint: Logie Baird FTW).

It also brought in the first significant wave of truly trashy fiction to hit these shores - James Hadley Chase, Harold Robbins and such. I've glanced through Robbins and Chase novels found in the bookshelves of relatives - all staunch, solid pillars of middle-class respectability, but damn, that is some depraved shit they've been reading. Some of these novels begin with brutal rape-murders and them move on to chart out a trail of incest, molestation, bizarre fetish sex and so on while adhering to some sort of adventure-thriller plot that apparently lifts the whole thing above mere pornography. I'm probably not a prude, but I think frank erotica is a lot less offensive than this sort of shoe-horned titillation of a rather graphic nature as part of a cynically-calculated entertainment formula. But the thing was that, for that generation, this was not their father's literary entertainment.I think people who lived through the 80s as adults tended to lose their earlier sense of taste in the wake of the increasing success of the American popular fiction machine and its ability to reach out to distant audiences.

Case in point: my father, whose interest in weird fiction began with old collections of Bierce and Blackwood stories from his father's collection, was sustained by 70s paperback anthologies, mostly from Pan and Fontana, which often included classic writers like Lovecraft and Smith, as well as somewhat newer greats like Campbell and Matheson, and then jumped on the King bandwagon, and today does not read a single horror writer other than King and the odd Koontz. King has written some good things, but it's a long, downward spiral from something like 'The Damned Thing' to Koontz' 'Intensity'.

Today I think there's a certain rearguard action among people of my age and a little older who are third- or fourth-generation school- and college-educated and have some sort of family intellectual tradition and generally try to stick to the Booker-Nobel sort of literary fiction (itself obviously a specific kind of genre), but it's an increasingly small and elitist demographic, one that has pretension so ingrained into its psyche that it imagines graphic storytelling was pretty much invented whole by Art Spiegelman and is cripplingly blind to the many good things that popular culture and genres have brought to the world of literature and storytelling. On the other hand there is a growing number of people who have the education without the pretension, who never had Shakespeare-Wakespeare quoted at them, who think popular music began with child-molesting boy-men falsettoing over disco beats, who think of Jim Carrey films as classics and are very happy to read something that 'goes by fast' and is either 'so thrilling yaar' or something 'I can really relate to'. Facile escapism for its own sake or equally facile self-affirmation for the sense of validation and consolation it brings.

Today, I have perhaps a dozen friends in India whose reading choices I have any respect for. More than half of them tend to be genre fans with a fondness for the more non-derivative sort of fantasy, horror and science fiction, a preference that seems to also predispose themselves towards more intelligent and interesting choices of non-genre reading matter. But genre - except mystery, which in certain forms is more easily assimilated into mainstream sensibilities - is but a blip on the democratic Indian reader and publisher's screen. There are a few indigenous practitioners, but it seems the best they can manage is a sort of sub-Pratchett, infra-Whedon bumptiousness, or to work in a mode not too far from the mainstream thriller or simply to re-jig Indian epics in the Martinesque fat fantasy format, something which is really just the latest avatar of the decades-long project to render our cultural heritage in ever more kitschy forms. Vandana Singh's SF short stories tower mightily above the rest, but she doesn't even live in India, and I suspect that her exposure to a broader world has helped shape her writing a great deal even though her stories are generally grounded in very Indian settings and contexts.

my funeral

2011-03-09T08:06:00.003+05:30

My paternal grandfather passed away early this Sunday. He was 95. My mother's second husband died last month in a road accident. He was 62, I think (I can be quite bad with specific numbers).

My maternal grandfather passed away in 2008 after being in poor health for several years. In 2009, I lost my paternal grandmother. I remember that these two deaths had a deep impact on me, although in the first case it took time for that impact to show. Several months later, listening to something as over-exposed as The Byrds' cover of 'Turn Turn Turn' I surprised myself by bursting into tears at the words 'A time to be born/ a time to die/A time to plant, a time to reap/A time to kill, a time to heal/A time to laugh, a time to weep'. Qohelet certainly understood the weight of mortality. I was able to attend my grandmother's funeral, and I realised what a cathartic and healing experience a funeral is, for the living.

My step-father did not have a funeral. He wanted his organs to be donated to people who needed them and what was left to be given to a medical college, partly inspired by this case. My mother is also an advocate of organ donorship.

As for myself, I have to admit that I like the symbolism of a funeral ceremony. It doesn't matter so much about the body - although, I'm not as altruistic as some, I think I'd just like it to be quietly incinerated in an electric crematorium without much of a fuss - but little as it would mean to me at that point, I'd like some sort of secular funeral service to be held. There should be music - if people don't think they can sit through Mahler's 9th I should prepare in advance a song list that will include pieces that I like and find relevant. I'd like some poetry to be read out - maybe some of my own if there's anything suitable by then - some prose excerpts from Montaigne, Sartre, Lovecraft, Borges...no doubt specific passages will suggest themselves to me over the years from other authors as well. A short address by three or four friends and relatives. And then a toast to the dead followed by a feast, for the living. It seems like a good way to wind things up.

that troglodyte groove

2011-02-28T07:48:00.002+05:30

When it comes to rock, my tastes run to the more visceral, raw fare. I don't really like rock music that is too smooth and polished - this is why bands like Porcupine Tree or the later Opeth lose me after a while. My objection isn't to musical ambition - King Crimson has that in spades but they never come across as trying to gild a lily - but to taking rock, essentially a rude, rhythm-led musical raspberry - and turning it into a statement that is so mannered and safe that even MTV might play it (also see: U2, Coldplay). I also feel that one can over-estimate the virtues of complexity when it comes to rock music, which is why i like returning to the proto-hard rock/heavy metal of the early 70s and late 60s from time to time. The rocking sounds I love the best stem from that era, and when I listen to a lot of modern metal, I think an immersion in the more free, spontaneous and ultimately powerful sounds of our troglodyte ancestors could do today's scene a world of good. So let's make like our wrists reach our ankles and stomp around to some truly antediluvian grooves:

en passant

2011-02-26T13:46:00.002+05:30

Today I am listening to Vaughan Williams and trying to write scary stories. There should be a parallel text to The Rest Is Noise which is all about the rest of twentieth century orchestral music, all the traditionalists accused of wallowing in the past, of bucolic cud-chewing or simply relegated to the dustbin of popular culture via movie soundtracks. I think a lot of their work will bear up to closer scrutiny.

I'm also thinking about how lonely it is to be the only boy in all of India who does not love Amar Chitra Katha comics. I liked some of them, especially the Jataka Tales retellings, but most seemed too sentimental and self-righteous and not well enough drawn or written for my liking. Tintin albums really did represent a much more consistent level of art and storytelling. But what do I know. One thing's for certain - there is room for a truly epic and gripping graphic novel retelling of the Mahabharatha. I just don't think ACK achieved that goal.

I've been reading Montaigne again. There are passages where the feeling of being in perfect communion with a mind around 5 centuries past is breathtaking. Also re-reading Pound's shorter poetry. Try - and succeed - as I do to despise Pound as a person I can't extend this loathing to his poetry.

Finally, a quote from another book I'm reading:

As long as we have breath in our bodies we are bound to the cycle that sustains our sense of time.
- Michael Frayn, 'The Human Factor'

It seemed like a good hook for a story. We shall see.

Bevar Sea on stage

2011-02-25T14:22:00.002+05:30

Oh I should post this as well - highlights from my band Bevar Sea's debut performance:

Apocalypso for one: excerpt

2011-02-25T13:51:00.001+05:30

The leviathan is beached and rotting. We emerge from the vast tonnage of flesh, our tentacles probe uncomprehendingly at the burned-out sky, our blind eyes cannot see in the eternal night that has fallen. We huddle back into the rapidly necrotizing tissues, trying to crawl our way back to the familiar, our hunger driving us closer and closer to the bone until we crack the bones open to suck the marrow, until we groan and grit our teeth on the bone fragments, choke on bone dust, fall upon one another, fighting to kill, killing to eat until at last I am left on a silent beach between two oceans of dust under a burned-out sky forever circling an empty space.

And then what?

I have a problem

2011-02-22T09:41:00.000+05:30

I buy too many of these:

and as a result, I never get to do this:

As a result, I've decided to dial it back a bit. One new book for every ten old ones I read, until the next significant increase in my income. Can I do it? Let's see.

Since making this resolution I've read the following books:

Athene: Image and Energy by Anne Shearer
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

And I haven't yet bought any more books.

2011-02-20T19:37:00.002+05:30

I'm not actually sure what any of it means. No one actually is, if they're honest. It's easier to conclude it means nothing, easy and probably right. It's easiest of all to decide that it does mean something and to find that something in love hate god atheism surrender rebellion art sports culture barbarism sex rape marijuana meditation enemas enemies friends lovers surgeons virgins saints sinners devils comedians cascading strings flowers mutual funds construction destruction defection improvement et cetera. Hardest of all is to decide it only has the meaning that you spend every minute of your life trying to give it. I could try that.

update

2011-02-18T16:45:00.001+05:30

Sibelius. Lots of Sibelius. Some Nabokov. Some mythology. Some Pulver. A little bit of writing. Life goes on, for the living.

the smiler

2011-02-03T17:02:00.000+05:30

Here's a song by my band, Bevar Sea.

remember remember

2011-02-01T12:23:00.000+05:30

My band, Bevar Sea, and a bunch of others, will be playing at Kyra Theatre Bangalore this Feb 6th. The show begins around 4 PM. Rs. 400 a ticket.

The Player Of Games by Iain M. Banks

2011-01-28T08:58:00.001+05:30

I've finished re-reading Iain M. Banks' The Player Of Games. I thought Banks showed a growing mastery of style in this novel, unlike Consider Phlebas where several sentences in a row were sometimes clotted with clauses and fly-specked with commas. The style is considerably more fluid here and the lyrical streak in Banks's prose is allowed more free rein in describing the various strange settings Jernau Gurgeh, the player of games, moves through as well as the mental states associated with his immersion in his game-playing.

Gurgeh is a master gamer, sent by Special Circumstances, the Culture's espionage wing, to the empire of Azad. Power in Azad is won as the result of an individual's peformance in the great game that gives the empire its name. I wonder if there's a nod here to the 'Great Game' between the British and Russian empires for control of central Asia in the 19th century. Banks' depiction of the empire of Azad is obviously a critique of imperialism and it goes beyond simple outrage to portray a society that is built on identifying and destroying innocence at every level. I can't help but read a similar critique of western foreign policy into the Culture's unwillingness to overtly enter into hostlities against a regime that is opposed to everything it stands for, out of deference to the common people of Azad, who would wind up being conscripted against their would-be liberators rather than uniting against their imperial oppressors in such a scenario.

The game of Azad is not shown in any detail; there is no way you can even approximate a description of its rules from the hints Banks lets out. Instead, Banks focuses on the mental rigours and insights Gurgeh has to experience to master the game. Again, this is a fascinating process because of the reactions of Gurgeh, a citizen of a loosely organised, anarchistic society to a rigidly structured and hierarchical society. At some level, Azad is not that different from any of our societies, a point that hits home when we see an Azad city through Gurgeh's eyes, with its crowds, traffic, chaos, sharp divides between privilege and poverty and its architectural patchwork.

The suspense grows to a fever pitch, and it soon becomes clear that Gurgeh is playing for higher stakes than simply to make a decent showing in the game of Azad and help boost the Culture's prestige. There's a memorable final act which works on both the surface level of the story and as a summation of the political and social ideas Banks is playing around with. Banks' mechanical characters continue to be more appealing and engaging than his humans, but otherwise, this is a satisfying novel, thought provoking, exciting and as good on my second read as I recall it being the first time around.

PS: The gender business, while fascinating to me the first time around, does not play a very significant role in anything. Banks' points about the differing role of gender in the egalitarian, sex-changing Culture and Azad could as well have been made with normal number of genders. It would also work better if I felt Banks actually had any intention of engaging with gender in any serious way, which a number of things in this novel and its predecessor argue against. Still, it's a nice little touch of SFnal strangeness.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

2011-01-25T15:10:00.000+05:30

For a long time, I admired Iain Banks from afar. I read his second SF novel, The Player Of Games, and I was blown away. It was different from the kind of SF I was familiar with (mostly Asimov and Clarke), somehow more baroque and kickass. I also read his non-SF debut, The Wasp Factory and was once again impressed. Then came a long period of time when I couldn't spend much on books, his books appeared in stores in India only sporadically and, knowing that the Culture books were a series, I thought I couldn't buy a random installment without having the previous ones. All that has been remedied now that I found a full set of his Sf novels (upto Matter) in a second-hand bookstore, and I finally get the chance to read Banks's SF novels in sequence.

So, Consider Phlebas. The Elliot quote suggests a certain ambition beyond the standard space opera, and the novel often delivers on it, incorporating themes of transformation, decay and death that echo The Waste Land. It's also a gripping space opera, following a rather unsavoury, ruthless protagonist on a quest for a MacGuffin. There are amazing set-pieces, like a game of chance on a world that is slated for destruction, vivid descriptions of fantastic worlds and places and some effective renderings of weird or non-human states of mind.

There's a complex plot that makes you think against the warp of the typical space opera, in so far as, if you think the arguments through, the protagonist's enemies emerge as the better side in this war. There are moments when the narrative seems to flounder under a sometimes over-dense style, but the last three chapters are a harrowing race to destruction that left me somewhat shattered.

I still don't know why anyone should care for the protagonist, least of all the two people who come to during the course of this novel. He's ruthless, murderous and completely self-seeking, willing to kill, lie and bide his time with one lover while trying to work his way back to a former lover and basically destroy anyone or anything to achieve his ends. At least he has the strength of his fanatical opposition to the Culture, an opposition that seems increasingly flawed and baseless as more is learned about his nature.

I also expect this to be something of a prelude; while there was much that I enjoyed abut this novel, not least its unflinching depiction of he consequences of religious fanaticism, this story feels something of a footnote. I'm certainly looking forward to my next Banks novel - a re-read of The Player Of Games!

Tomcat speaks out

2011-01-18T17:11:00.006+05:30

I’ve heard that cats see very differently from human beings, that they see much more and much less, depending on how you look at it. Cats don’t see all the colour and field of view that human beings do, instead seeing a sort of haze in which motion is very clearly and quickly detected. Now, I’ve been a cat all for all my life, and a human for none of it, so I can’t comment with such authority on these differences. If humans really see all that much colour and field of view, then more power to them. Then again, having been, as I said, a cat for all my life I can tell you a thing or two about what it it is that cats do see.

First of all, we see light. We see it as a wild, flowing fluid, trying very hard to drench every inch of available space. When we enter a room, the first thing we do is to take a look at the light, see what it’s up to and adjust our eyes accordingly.

We see shadows. We see shadows of things that are there, which is pretty interesting as it is, but we also see shadows of things that aren’t there, things that may have been there very long ago, or that are going to be there in future, or things that may never, ever be there, but could have.We spend a lot of time staring at them.

We see all the creatures in a place, the ones that are of a sufficient size and scale to be seen, but we also see all the creatures that are thinking of that space, the ones that are being thought of in that space and the ones that the space itself is thinking of. You’d be surprised to know who your kitchens think of, or your balconies.We spend a lot of time stalking these creatures or playing with them if they are friendly, or even if they aren't.

We see intention and emotion at a glance. We can see when someone is angry, or tired, or just not interested, but we don’t care. If we’re playful, or cuddly we’ll test those people anyway until they give on, or confirm what we already know about their state of mind.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my little essay. I’ve tried to show you how cats don’t always act upon what they see and how they don’t always see what humans seem to act upon. I haven’t tried to make any assumptions about what humans can or can’t see, but that’s because cats are far too arrogant to assume knowledge that they do not have. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a shadow there that you don’t seem to care about which I have to go inspect.

come early, come often

2011-01-17T14:42:00.000+05:30

My band, Bevar Sea's first gig, opening for Degredead and Orphaned Land.

A Song For Monday

2011-01-17T14:00:00.001+05:30

Machine Head gets the least spins of all the Mk. II albums from me, but it's still a great album and this is a great jam.

some recent reads

2011-01-13T08:40:00.000+05:30

The Man Who Japed by Philip K Dick: An early PKD novel, this is already characteristic of his work, creating a dystopian setting where morality is enforced by the community, aided by spy robots, and mass media serve to help reinforce the Puritan values that prevail. The options to this are to wallow in the fantasies provided by a mental health institutes 'Other World' or to head out to the frontiers of space and start again as a colonist. Nearly any other American SF writer would have his hero choose the last option, but the man who japed finds a different path, although one that will eventually lead him to outer space. AE van Vogt's influence on PKD is always worth noting, and is perhaps reflected here by the fact that the protagonist is ultimately shown to be the only sane man in an insane society - shades of Gilbert Gosseyn (Go-SANE)? Some fresh, evocative turns of phrase as well, belying one common assumption that PKD had great concepts but was a sloppy or limited craftsman.

Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec: This book is a maze, a mosaic, a jigsaw-puzzle and a hall of mirrors. Perec describes all the people, animals (all cats, incidentally) and things within a single apartment building in Paris at a particular point in time just before the death of one of its inhabitants. In the process, he ranges far afield in time and space to tell us the strange, and often strangely parallel stories of the people who have lived here over the years. Writers as diverse as Borges, Calvino, Beckett, Nabokov, Chandler and Hemingway would have been glad to have invented some or all of these stories. This book is great fun to read, purely for the pleasures of the imagination that it offers, but there are interesting things going in the subtext too.

Igraine The Brave by Cornelia Funke: A warm-hearted, funny fantasy tale for younger readers that is not without its moments of suspense and wonder and the odd subversion of genre cliches. And a talking cat, who talks just about as much as you'd expect your local tabby tom to talk if given the power of speech, which is to say, not very often and always to the point.

2011-01-12T14:35:00.002+05:30

One of the best possible perspectives from which to tell a story is that of a ghost, someone who is dead but can still witness.

- Javier Marias

YOUR FACE TOMORROW 2: DANCE AND DREAM BY JAVIER MARIAS

2011-01-10T07:48:00.002+05:30

This was the first Javier Marias novel where I actively skimmed through sections; it's also the middle part of what I suspect will be his greatest achievement yet. Does that seem contradictory? Let me explain.

Marias' prose tends towards long elaborations and digressions, with sentences spanning paragraphs, paragraphs spanning pages and parenthetical statements that take on a voluminous life of their own. In previous novels that I've read (The Man Of Feeling, All Souls, Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me) by Marias, the emphasis is more on character and reverie, making each clause, qualification and detour a natural part of the reading experience.

This sequence of novels carries on with the same emphasis on characterisation, dialogue and interior narrative, but it has an added element of plot interest - Jaime Deza, the displaced Spanish academic of All Souls has now been recruited by some quasi-official covert intelligence operation. But it isn't just the elements of a spy thriller that make it harder to wait out the many ruminative passages here; with this set of novels it would seem that Marias, for all that his previous novels were literary masterpieces of the highest calibre, has finally decided to play for higher stakes and move beyond the more personal scale of his previous novels to confront a larger theme - violence itself, what motivates it, and whether it can ever be justified. All this gives the narrative a forward momentum that his previous novels didn't quite have; even here, he's taken his time to build the pace and pitch from the relatively more leisured first volume to the second, which has left me impatient to get on with the last volume.

The stakes feel higher than ever before, the story cuts closer to the bone and the plot itself has enough suspense that for once, I feel I must eschew absorbing every detail so that I can absorb the whole faster; I hope, once I finish the third book, that I find the time some day to go back and properly study the passages I've sped through this time. I'm also eager to see if the the third volume fulfills the promise of this being the most significant literary achievement and statement yet by one of today's very finest novelists.

THE ANTHOLOGIST - NICHOLSON BAKER

2011-01-07T14:07:00.001+05:30

'You need the art in order to love the life'.

The narrator of this novel, a poet suffering from self-doubt, writer's block, financial uncertainty and relationship problems, concludes an anecdote about Luise Bogan and Theodore Roethke, two well-known poets who were briefly lovers, with the line I've just quoted. And there, it seems, is the heart of all his problems. Because Paul Chowder is just not sure if he has the art, and not knowing for sure, he can't be sure he loves the life. So he puts obstacles in his way, claims a deep love for rhyme in poetry, holds unconventional ideas about metre and scansion and cultivates a contempt for the sort of unrhymed modern verse that he actually both loves and practices. It's all an act, at some level, a way to trial-reject himself, to see if he can throw himself away because his art is not blindingly, self-evidently abiding - yet - and so, neither is his life. So far, so very good. But it also falls short a bit, the pivotal experience that seems to smash through his blockages - an attack of tears during a masterclass he is conducting during a poetry congress in Switzerland - seems oddly flat and pat, as if Baker decided that enough was enough and it was time to give Chowder some sort of new lease on his art and his life and be done with it.

Marcel Inhoff, a mean internet bully and habitual drinker, has a very thorough and useful review of this book here which I strongly suggest reading before you read the book, f you do.

or perhaps especially if

2011-01-07T13:02:00.001+05:30

I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn't exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.

- Caitlin R. Kiernan, in this interview.

or better yet, you get a dayjob and spare us the pabulum

2011-01-03T15:11:00.000+05:30

Seen on an aspiring writers' forum:

This is roughly the current style. You use it because it is. You practice it. You study the market, not what is selling now, but what the publishers are buying for publication in two year's time. Then you write a story that has that special something that will catch the eye of an agent or publisher. Even this might not get you published. But if you are serious about getting published you do it. That does not stop you working on your 30 plus POV, risk taking novel in your spare time.

movies recently seen

2011-01-03T14:26:00.002+05:30

Clerks was just about as entertaining and profane as I remember it being. Well worth revisiting.

The Mothman Prophecies reminded me why I don't really follow mainstream Hollywood films on these sorts of topics. Some fairly eerie premonitions of terror diluted by a clunky attempt to build a romantic sub-plot and big-ticket disaster sequence that squanders all the weirdness away in favour of senseless visual kicks. The dialogue is painful throughout, serving all too often to spell out in far too many words what any reasonably smart viewer has already figured out. I hate these stories that end with whatever strangeness that has been invoked resulting in a crescendo of frantic destruction and then stopping at the point beyond which, presumable, normalcy can be restored (Stephen King specialises in this sort of thing). Bullshit. Normalcy doesn't just reconvene itself after something like that, how would these people carry on after their lives have been touched by something so big and weird, do they become reclusive paranoiacs like Leek, or self-promoting conspiracy peddlers like some 'real' mothman-encounterers, will they retreat to the backwoods and start some sort of lepidoptera-worshipping cult of Psyche? One of the reasons Vertigo is so brilliant is that it starts off by showing us a likely consequence of having your sanity threatened that badly.

Let The Right One In may not have the stark, haunting power of Martin, but as a vampire flick that chooses to remain well within its genre instead of deconstructing it, it's a rather effective narrative, sad and sweet and horrifying at the same time.

Books Read in 2011

2011-01-01T14:22:00.008+05:30

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror: Chris Priestley ***
The White Company: Arthur Conan Doyle ***
Playback: Raymond Chandler **
The Anthologist: Nicholson Baker ***
Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance And Dream: Javier Marias *****
The Man Who Japed: Philip K. Dick ****
Life - A User's Manual: Georges Perec *****
Igraine The Brave: Cornelia Funke ***
The Astrological Diary Of God: Bo Fowler **

2010-12-27T08:03:00.002+05:30

'The religious imagination, he felt, was a most precious part of the human spirit, but he was convinced that it did not require particular religious beliefs, or indeed any religious belief.' Oliver Sacks on David Randolph.

THE LAST EXORCISM (2010)

2010-12-27T07:57:00.001+05:30

I thought that the last major English-language exorcism-themed movie that I saw, The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, was morally reprehensible. Created in the wake of cases where exorcism techniques contributed to the death of a minor, the movie claimed to present a dialogue between faith and doubt and wound up stacking the odds in favour of faith and tacitly condoning the emotional and physical abuse innocent, troubled people are subjected to in the name of faith.

So when I read about this, a film that portrays an evangelical minister who has had a crisis of faith and wishes to do one last exorcism in the company of a documentary film crew to expose the whole fraudulent process, I had high hopes. Even given that it was a horror film, there were so many ways the horror could play out without falling into the sanctimonious space occupied by the Emily Rose flick.

And for a while, that's what it seemed to be. When his disabled son is helped by doctors, he realises he is grateful to the doctors, not to god. He reads of an autistic child being killed during an exorcism, and this compounds his disillusionment. So far so good. The backwoods Louisiana farmer whose daughter is apparently possessed is a man of stern, almost insane faith, which provides an ironic contrast to the slick reverend, who is able to work the charismatic godman mojo on autopilot even after his crisis.

Then it turns out that the girl in question is more than just a little troubled, and the reverend's brand of exorcism-as-catharsis isn't enough to chase away her demons. Still, those demons are presented as purely psychological, and I have no issue with any of what is shown right up until the last 15 minutes of the film. That's when the film takes a sudden u-turn into schlock Hammer-style Horror, complete with Satanic cult, demon fetus and murderous cultists - all updated via Blair Witch-style shakeycam mockumentary cinematography.

Those last few minutes might serve up the requisite eleventh-hour big screen horror chills, but they also betray all the promise of the rest of the movie. So - the girl wasn't possessed, but the reverend was wrong and the devil still is real? Who wrote this script, the pope? Maybe this wasn't a loathsome apology for child abuse like 'Emily Rose', but 'The Last Exorcism' was a film that had a chance to stick to a skeptical, humanist viewpoint and still be a chilling film, and then threw it all away to hit a few all-too-familiar horror flick power chords.

2010-12-26T10:13:00.004+05:30

Most 'creative' people I know, meet them again 5 years later and they still haven't written that novel, painted that masterpiece, drawn that graphic novel, composed that awesome set of songs, but they've thought up so many new ways to make money out of their so-called talent. Here's a little credo against becoming like them.

There are so many ways for people with some creative ability to dumb down what they do and sprinkle a bunch of bullshit keywords and jargon over it and make money.

Most people with any talent whom I've known tend to fall quite happily into that rut and get by for years, decades even, without ever doing anything creative that stretches them to the limits of their ability and is compelled from within rather than from fiscal necessity.

To live like this is a fundamental form of dishonesty; it doesn't matter if they make token gestures like clinging to a bohemian lifestyle or refusing to wear ties. They are already cogs in the machine, because the machine is cunning and knows how to use their surface individuality to power its own cookie-cutter agenda.

Don't spend your whole life being a cog.

Start a web comic and update it at least twice a month. Write a short story every week. Keep the good ones, revise them, send them out. If they get rejected, start a webzine and publish yourself. Start a garage band. Rehearse like you mean to break into the Top Twenty, but write songs that actually mean something. Do something, anything, for the love of it. Do it consistently, keep getting better at it. It may get you nowhere, but at least you'll die having lived, and not just having packaged and hawked your surface individuality to the corporate overlords.

It's That Easy

2010-12-23T18:12:00.000+05:30

'you need to sound human, and that the only way to do that is to BE human'

death, again and always

2010-12-23T13:07:00.001+05:30

It's been horrific.

All day, the sounds of trees being cut, the roar and rumble of construction equipment. At night, the barking of dogs around 2 AM as displaced strays from the construction site roam the yards and alleys looking for new turf.

Then, on, saturday, after three nights in a row of letting the strays out of a fenced compound down below that they'd been jumping into but couldn't scale out of, the bodies. Two of our lovely, peripatetic cats dead. Suddenly we realise why three of our other cats who loved to roam the neighbourhood haven't come home for a while. Asking around, Yasmine finds that a dead cat was found in an adjoining compound. Sounds like one of ours. I'm scared to pursue this line of inquiry.

So now we go around at night, rounding up all the little furry wanderers, bringing them back home and locking them in for the night. Yasmine built a barricade out of abandoned lumber and discarded plumbing. It seems to have kept the dogs out, but this morning we could hear them rattling the pipes. They want to find their way back in. They mean to.

I feel like Neville, but worse, with a flock to look after and protect from the nocturnal siege.

It's horrific.

2010-12-20T13:21:00.000+05:30

This book is currently rocking my world:

Odysseus/Ulysses is an interesting character, a man on the verge. He's not quite like the rest of the Achaean heroes, not driven by rage like Achilles, pride like Ajax or greed like Agamemnon. His motivations and methods are more complex and subtle, and this subtlety has often brought him odium - accusations of cowardice, trickery and deceit. Placed in a 4th century legend, he belongs more to the emerging Greek world of the 5th century, he's a forerunner to a more recognisably modern type, but he's still archaic in many ways, still halfway between Trickster and Hero, roles that, at his best he combines to present a more integrated ideal. He is an exemplary character, but even the qualities he exemplifies are more subtle than simple courage, strength or honour. The different phases of his myth-history, the ways in which different eras have reacted to and redefined him say a lot about changing ideas of morality, reality and humanity. Perhaps all this will also serve as part of a big build-up to a re-read of both Homer and Joyce next year.

Beethoven during breakfast

2010-12-18T10:26:00.000+05:30

saturday morning

the roar of the construction sites churns the hapless air
they're building tombstone towers for the zombies out there
i'm listening to beethoven's fifth
i'm nursing a clenched fist
three days after an old friendship finally comes to its senses and ends
there is a moment when someone reminds me that we're old friends

and i decide not to have that glass of brandy after all
so why am i pincering splinters out of my gullet
why am i laughing blood into the air
filled now with the final ride into the breathless allegro

(That was a weak poem by me. The title is a reference to this, a rather good poem by Richard Wilbur)

2010-12-17T19:13:00.003+05:30

I should just dedicate the rest of my life to quoting M. John Harrison. Here we go again:

A fantasy is not a promissory note, cashable in the bank of the real. A fantasy should attempt to stand for something that isn’t there; somewhere in the turbulence generated by that attempt, it should imply all the things that are.

ted, just admit it

2010-12-17T10:30:00.001+05:30

Science, Education & Art are more important.

2010-12-14T14:24:00.002+05:30

Yesterday, waiting for a traffic light to change, I found myself beside a stationery shop. For nearly 4 minutes I gazed at this paragon of blameless, beneficial and clement industry, wondering why I had not ended up in such a placid and stable job. Then I thought about the forests axed, about the slow shift to pixel, and I decided it was probably a pipe dream anyway. A momentary pipe dream of a stationary occupation.

'I think we're property. '

2010-12-14T07:31:00.002+05:30

The Radia Tapes leak showed us what most reasonably aware Indians have long known or at least strongly suspected - that the nation is little more than a private project being run by a small group of CEOs, politicians, gurus and journalists. In a similar way, the Wikileaks shutdowns have shown us what we all should have known all along - that the net is not free or open, and it never was.

Pigs, geese, cattle.
First find out they are owned.
Then find out the whyness of it.
I suspect that, after all, we're useful -- that among contesting claimants, adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more primitive, owners of us -- all others warned off -- that all this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones upon this earth, a cult or order, members of which function like bellwethers to the rest of us, or as superior slaves or overseers, directing us in accordance with instructions received -- from Somewhere else -- in our mysterious usefulness.

- Charles Fort, The Book Of The Damned (1919)

2010-12-10T21:41:00.001+05:30

The cry for likable characters that resounds across user-generated book review pages. How does it signify? I can understand wanting coworkers, parents, friends, spouses you can like - better yet, wanting downright amazing, challenging and constantly stimulating characters in said roles. But likable is so dishrag, so neutered Legacy Character. Likable is what happens when you take the idea of following the adventures of two rogues but then sink into soap operatic explorations of past traumas and comings of various ages to the point of overwhelming the essential roguishness. Fafhrd & Mouser rarely paused to dwell on past regret before moving on to the next heist, the next wench, the next crazy caper. Likable? Not always. Compelling? Completely.
(Here observe a likable fellow; a family man; religious; would do anything to help a pal)

Timescape by Gregory Benford

2010-12-08T09:59:00.000+05:30

This is a fascinating and gripping novel, full of ideas, expressed lyrically but with precision and peopled with well-rounded characters whose personal and inner lives are not merely dimension-lending addenda to the story. It falls apart a bit because there are maybe too many ideas, too many strands of thought and speculation - time travel, time paradoxes, multiple universes, the nature of time, of reality, of causation, unpredictable outcomes, environmental myopia and so forth. These are all interesting elements, dealt with intelligently, but it's all a bit too much for even this relatively lengthy novel (around 400 pages in trade paperback) and as a result some of the themes seem insufficiently explored or resolved. Still, a good novel, both as science fiction and as fiction, and it gives me more reason to explore Benford's work than the first of his novels that I tried, 'Against Infinity'.

2010-12-07T10:08:00.000+05:30

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of café au lait.

- Marcel Proust. Quote via A Piece Of Monologue who found it in Alain de Botton's Proust book.

There Will Be Skulls

2010-12-06T13:05:00.003+05:30

Wow.

I've always known Silverberg is one of the Great Old Ones. A cornerstone of the genre, author of books like Nightwings, Thorns and Dying Inside that are classics in the genre, and would be classics outside the genre as well if the consensus cogs would get their heads out from up the bums of D. DeLillo, I. McEwan and so forth for long enough to notice. But it's one thing to admit a writer into your personal canon and and quite another to be reminded, knee to the groin, uppercut to the jaw, nose leaking blood, head pinned down in the sand, that here, make no mistakes, is the real thing - a champion brawler, and he's not pulling his punches.

The Book Of Skulls is a yarn about four young men on a quest for immortality. It's a playing out of a cunningly crafted problem in human nature - given that only two out of four will win, that one must kill himself and one must be killed with the consent of the others, who will crack, who will triumph, and why?

It's a quadruple character study as we weave in between four first-person narratives, each one not perfectly reliable, each one rendered with perfect pitch. A virtuoso performance, but that's not all. Why are these four young men on this quest? Which of their motivations has what it takes to survive all the hardships and doubts on the way? What makes a person strong or weak? Silverberg unfolds answers to these questions with a feel for plot, language and character that is frankly awe-inspiring.

He also scores one for the genre in general.This story could not have been so profound and so real if it was just another 70s yarn about college boys from different backgrounds roadtripping across the US of A. It's the fantastic element that throws everything into perspective, that lets Silverberg give his story the momentum, presence and the power to say something about the everyday human concerns that underpin it. They say speculative fiction is about thought experiments and this is a thought experiment in human nature, conceived and carried out by a behemoth talent.

three new ones

2010-12-02T11:11:00.001+05:30

1. marginalia
There's a margin of error
a margin for miscalculations
a margin for the unexpected
In my book of squares
a margin where the solution is worked out
a margin for calculation
a margin where the expected evolves
Beyond the margin, the next page
or no pages at all: the rest of the world

2. exotica
definitely a scent of coriander
and quite certainly a whiff
of devil's root
then let's take a walk
yes that is a jacaranda
see where the domesticated
holy basil blossoms
you want grime? contrast? We'll
see unwashed children
play in and with dirt
leave mounds of dung
alongside this ribbon of black
- that men rush along
alone in vehicles that seat eight
- that is dug up every three months
phone lines, water lines, power lines
see the data pulsing, humming
the antiseptic boxes of servitude
where serfs earn the right
to strut in their own realm
you want texture, scent, stink,
old, new, young, old,
silk, cotton, jute, gold, lies, truth
a senile culture/a superpower's youth
yes ma'am, yes sir
it's all here just walk this way
you'll have it all
I'll introduce you to the exotic pets
who will sing to you the exotic texts
just don't expect me
to wait around and listen

3. minutiae
now that I've dispensed
with the pomp and expense
of the large themes

I can start
my diary of dreams

two from Italy

2010-11-29T08:30:00.000+05:30

Black Sunday, I'm afraid did not do it for me at all. Barbara Steele is a horror icon, and both director Bava and this film are considered to be cornerstones of Italian and indeed European horror. Personally, I thought the atmosphere and character design (as far as the two villains went) was brilliant, but the story itself did nothing especially interesting or well. The opening scene with the mask of Satan is searing, but that intensity is lost in a film that meanders about, spending far too much time with the wrong characters. There was an eerie story here about a young girl growing up in an isolated castle, each day resembling the portrait of an ill-fated ancestress even more. A story about a personality that managed to survive death, shaping innocent victims into its own form until it could find the perfect vessel. But it is lost in a stock horror plot that adds nothing new to the bag of tricks pioneered by Universal in the 30s and 40s and fails to capitalise on its sporadic moments of utter brilliance.

Far more satisfying was Umberto D. which sat perfectly on that cusp between the maudlin and the cynical both of which are viewpoints that would have distorted the humane clarity of this brilliant story. I really can't bring myself to say more than that - you simply have to watch this one, if you haven't already.

2010-11-26T08:19:00.000+05:30

"What helps for me-- if help comes at all-- is to find the mustard seed of the funny at the core of the horrible and futile."

- Philip K Dick

In that spirit, a new, futile fiction.

favourite music of 2010, so far

2010-11-23T08:29:00.005+05:30

I've listened to maybe a 100 of this year's releases so far and here are a few that stood out. In no particular order:

Fatso Jetson: Archaic Volumes
Triptykon: Eparistera Daimones
Horn Of The Rhino: Weight Of Coronation
Karma To Burn: Appalachian Incantation
Drudkh: Handful Of Stars
Hail Of Bullets: On Divine Winds
Man's Gin
Jeff Beck: Emotion And Commotion
Ramesses: Take The Curse
Firebird: Double Diamond
Samsara Blues Experiment: Long Distance Trip
Darkthrone: Circle The Wagons
Bison BC: Dark Ages
Earthride: Something Wicked
Torche: Songs For Singles
Eibon: Entering Darkness
Sardonis
Bongripper: Satan Worshipping Doom
Dragonauta: Cruz Invertida
La Otracina: Reality Has Got To Die
Kings Of Frog Island 3
Slough Feg: The Animal Spirit
Agrimonia: Host Of The Winged
Weapon: From The Devil's Tomb
Coffinworm: When All Became None
Negura Bunget: Virstele Pamintului
Deathspell Omega: Paracletus
Those Poor Bastards: Gospel-Haunted
Melechesh: The Epigenesis
Immolation: Majesty And Decay
Zoroaster: Matador
Swans: My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky
Witchery: Witchkrieg
Nominon: Monumentomb

SEX MISSION

2010-11-23T07:50:00.003+05:30

When I heard about this movie, over on the Science Fiction forums on yuku, I knew I had to seek it out and watch it, ASAP, as the corporate drones say. A Polish film, it was made in 1984, Iron Curtain still intact, Communist regime still in place, and became one of the most popular Polish films ever. How did they get away with it?

Because, despite the title and the flashes of nudity throughout this film, it isn't even a soft porn but a social and political satire in that broad, knowing but not quite cynical manner that I associate with Eastern European satire in general. In the 90s - the near future when this film was made - two men are put in suspended animation as an experiment. They are to be revived in three years. Instead, when they are finally awakened, half a century has passed. A global war involving nuclear and biological weapons has rendered the surface of the earth uninhabitable and wiped out the male species. Female survivors live in underground shelters, reproducing by what essentially amounts to a form of cloning.

When the two men are found and resurrected, they soon find that this all-female future world has no room for them, considering them 'the missing link between apes and women' their fate is either to be killed or 'naturalised' - turned into females. One of the men is a cocky, swaggering braggart, the other a clumsy, bumbling worrier. Together, they have to somehow triumph over armed and deadly female warriors and find a way to escape. Fortunately, the braggart's inept attentions have stirred long-dormant instincts in one of the female scientists...

This film is often laugh-out-loud hilarious with its digs on politics of both the sexual and official variety. Much fun is had at the expense of various forms of sexism and authoritarianism - so much so that one can't help but wonder what the censors made of it all. A hidden gem from the bad old Cold War world (already then on its last legs) and an excellent science fiction satire.