You may call it genre-bending or genre-defying or doing away with genre-snobbery, Gaiman and Ishiguro had this most fantastic conversation which you cannot afford to miss.
There is so much to love about this conversation which actually comes as a part of a New Statesman special issue edited by Gaiman and Palmer.
The issue was to have a special cover designed by Art Spiegelman but alas.
British Library has this most brilliant exhibition on comics, Comics Unmasked. The exhibition not only traces the history of comics but also how comics have influenced other industries like music, video games and films.
The exhibition recreates the desk of Mark Millar, one of the greatest comic artists of the UK, with a monitor showing clips from Kickass and a note which said ‘And you really thought this was made in Hollywood?’ or something to that effect.Millar’s other popular comic include the Secret Service which has also recently been turned into a film.
Kickass was a good film but Kickass the comic is even more fun.
I am just amazed at how culture undergoes so much of transformation while travelling ‘across the pond’ and transcending mediums.
One of my favourite authors Teju Cole, on whether he is embarrassed about not reading enough books.
No, this is not a quiz question. This is actually pretty embarrassing, but I am kind of in need of some pop culture help here.
I watched this very interesting play a few days back – A Man for all Seasons. The play, slightly dull talked about the Henry the Eight, no-heir-second-marriage episode and the creation of Protestant Church by moving away from Pope’s Roman Catholic. The whole story was told from the perspective of Sir Thomas More, staunch Catholic, and the trials and tribulations he goes through by not swearing allegiance to the new Church.I found the play to be just okay.
Now the embarrassing part – there is this book I’ve recommended to other people before, which tell the same story from another character’s perspective and when I was trying to recollect the name recently, my mind went completely, totally blank. I knew the name of that book, but no, now the name eludes me. It drove me completely nuts last week. And the worst thing is, forgetting the name of this book is only a small fragment in the grand scheme of things. I have this sneaking suspicion that I am really growing old, albiet gradually. Like my neurons are beginning to realize that they cannot spark and retrieve information when I need them to. It shows in the oddest of instances – when you cannot recall the name of that newspaper editor ia quiz or the name of that actor when you’re talking to a friend about another movie. It’s like as if you know it just before that particular flash of second when you needed to know it the most.
There are three conclusions I draw from this:
I am getting old. My brain cells realize this and are slowly committing harakiri. I like that mental image, actually. Billions and billions of microscopic katana in my head slicing through axons (axii?) in I-am-too-old-for-this-shit bursts.
I think I am all set to become an unreliable narrator. I have a valid excuse.
This space intentionally left blank. I forgot what I had to say. (See? SEE?)
Post-script: Somewhere in the middle of writing this post, the name of the book just popped in my head. And it was the audible, life-affirming sort of pop, like when you suddenly swallow and the buzzing in your ear goes away and everything sounds so much clearer. It does not do anything about my feeling of losing-it-all, but whew. I know what the name is. Yes, that defeats the whole purpose of this post, but hey, what’s a nice redundant post between friends, huh?
As you were, folks. Keep calm and carry on.
Post post-script: The name of the book, for those of you interested, is Wolf Hall. It’s written by Hilary Mantel who won a Booker for this a couple of years back. And she has just come out with a sequel to this book – Bring up the Bodies.
There’s nothing in a literature festival more literarily stimulating than the carnival atmosphere. Plenty of words, wordplay, a couple of Nobel laureates but without the sense of magnitude and detail — crowds, durbars, tents, tented lawns, tainted halls and painted faces — how would the global zeitgeist be captured even by the convergence of so much literary genius on a historic locale for colour, continuity and mock controversy? Are these writers on holiday, or writers at work?
Needless to say, I had a brilliant time.
Supriya Nair has one of the best summaries of the festival here.
Mayank has the best pictures here one of which also features me 🙂
The videos of the sessions are here and here.
And the sessions which I enjoyed the most were ‘The Crisis of American Fiction‘ and Vikram Seth’s ‘The Suitable Book‘.
It’s occasionally been found in speeding taxis and Paris hotel rooms. Alpine meadows and mourning doves are rich in it, though can be hard to find. Forget about fountains and rainbows, they’re myths. Rarely it falls from geese flying north. Sometimes sunlight on water contains trace amounts. Check in the attic and under the peonies, but it moves fast and is hard to catch. Now and then it has been stolen from babies sleeping on airplanes. From girls reading in parks. From headlines and editorials. If you never take a water aerobics class, you’ll have more time than some. Give up all hope, and you might get a little more. Say no. Smile. Read. Read even when you should be sleeping. That time counts double. I-95 is a gold mine, though you’ll have to fight others for the time found there. Take the bus. Follow the river. Don’t be afraid to be late. Read poetry. Poetry gives time back, but most people don’t know it. Never watch television. Movies are fine. Documentaries are better. Sometimes, read novels in translation. Just consider it. Don’t remodel your kitchen. Don’t remodel anything. Don’t even think about it! Hire a babysitter, or not. Make do. Let your spouse help. Stay calm. Go to New York. Leave New York. Again, never take a water aerobics class. Don’t get a dog. Decorate minimally, including holidays. Maintain no position on Halloween costumes or children’s birthday parties. Use gift bags. Shop rarely. Spot clean. Keep a notebook. Copy. Borrow. Mimic. Steal. Never offer to be class parent. Volunteer elsewhere, if you must. Do not scrapbook. Avoid cooking. Bake once in a while. Rewrite, repeat. Listen to music. Have a drink.
If you do all this, one day you might find a package on your doorstep. Open it carefully. Inside will be time, tied in bundles of a thousand, smelling of jasmine. Congratulations! It’s all yours. Now hide it well.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2010/12/13kane.html
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To study the evolution of the language, a few students at Harvard have come a nifty little yet powerful Google tool that lets you track the usage of words or phrases over a period of time. Once you feed in your query it scans the entire corpus of over 200 million Google books to arrive at very interesting trend graphs.
As I see it, the Books Ngram Viewer could be used not only to track the evolution of language and trends over time, but also to compare and contrast the frequency of certain terms online and in print (perhaps when used in tandem with tools akin to Google Trends.)
The tool can be tried here: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info
And the piece of research on cultural evolution basis Google Books as printed in Science is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/15/science.1199644
Loud Opinion 