I love dark chocolate.

Actually, I really love chocolate per se (Nikki Giovanni writes: “The reason I like chocolate is / I can lick my fingers / And nobody tells me I’m not polite”) I love the sensualness of it – the gooey taste of it in your mouth, the richness of it coating your tongue, the way the pleasure melts slowly into your bloodstream.

I wrote once:

Who dreamt
That joy could be this dark?
That love could be bitten in half
So easily?
That guilt was a girl with sticky hands?

Who knew regret could taste like sunlight?
Or that the defeat of an entire summer
Would dissolve in a single mouth?

When you give yourself equally
There is no surrender
There is only the certainty of being melted and glorious
At the instant of your destruction.

- ‘Chocolate’; December 2003

But dark chocolate is a special favourite of mine – there’s something about the intense bitterness of it that makes it, for me, the concentrated essence of everything chocolate-y. A really good dark chocolate is like fine wine – that first insistent rosebud of flavour that blossoms slowly into the full, rich flower of an aftertaste. The same heady feeling flowing straight from your palate to your brain, the connections in your head resolving themselves into a network of intense, almost infinite joy.

Some people, I know, don’t like dark chocolate – they feel it’s too bitter. For such philistines there are many alternatives – milk chocolates, peanut flavoured chocolates, granola bars, even (shudder!) fruit candies. But for the true chocolate connoisseur there is only one true taste of chocolate – and that is the subtle, delicate and amazingly concise flavour of genuine bitterness.

P.S. A friend of mine brought me two huge slabs of dreamy dark chocolate this weekend, hence the rapture. This post is most definitely dedicated to her.

Forgive me, I couldn’t resist.

At the risk of offending people who take hip-hop seriously, I have to admit that I died laughing reading this article about the rapidly changing nomenclature of a certain popular ‘artist’. I can totally see how people who listen to hip-hop could have problems dealing with the incredible complexity of names over two syllables. How were they to know that the P was silent.

For what it’s worth, I think this is a bold and dynamic artistic move, that many other artist should emulate. Think of all the other people who could have names that were so much more evocative, if they just chose not to mind their Ps: Britney Sears, Ink Floyd, The Artist formerly known as Rinse, The Retenders, Jimmy Age, Charlie ‘Arker, Aul McCartney; not to mention the Red Hot Chilli Eers or Dee Urle.

What do passport photos have against me? I mean, okay, so I’m no Cary Grant to look at, but my homely little visage is serviceable enough – useful for being recognised at my favourite coffee shop and for being cooed over by myopic great aunts (the only people in the world who continue to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that I am a ‘handsome young man’). But put this same mug on a passport size snap and you instantly have something that will have every self-respecting homeland security guard reaching for his gun, and editors from the National Enquirer clamouring for permission to use it as part of their lead story on ‘Signs of Extra-Terrestrial Life’.

This has been true for as far back as I can remember. In college, my black and white passport snap became the subject of much concern at the UNHCR, and some little know African country was almost put under sanctions until someone pointed out that it was just my normal face – not the grim rictus of some fiendish warlord’s half-famished victim. In b-school my photograph gained acclaim among ornithologists as depicting (in the shape of my hair) a wonderful example of the nest-building technique of the common Indian crow. My yearbook photograph is an intense exploration of the artistic possibilities of roadkill, as inspired by Paul Klee. The snap of me in my passport regularly gives pause to the most stalwart immigration officials, causing them to blanch in shock and giving the phrase ‘undesirable alien’ a whole new meaning. When I applied to grad school the photograph I sent in had the media trumpeting the return of the Michelin man, complete with three spare tires under his chin. As for the photograph on my current security ID – let’s just say that every time I swipe it, it takes the automated doors an extra three seconds or so to decide to let me in. And even then they’re pretty reluctant.

The one good passport-size photograph I ever had taken (my collar was straight, my hair looked combed, my eyes were open, I was ACTUALLY smiling) was one of those instant four piece things (so that I couldn’t get copies) of which one snap went into an application for a gym that I never visited, a second was given to my travel agent who then proceeded to lose it and two others got destroyed accidentally when someone didn’t bother to check whether there was anything in the envelope before tearing it. I sometimes think the gods are jealously guarding my face from the general public.

What is it about passport size photos that makes them so difficult? To begin with there’s the smile. Look, I’m as happy a person as the next guy and am capable of laughing like a madman when the spirit takes me, but I just can’t turn it on and off at random. And what self-respecting person is going to go around saying the names of dairy products in public at four o clock in the afternoon? So there I’ll be, sitting in the photographer’s studio and the person will say “smile” like it’s an order, only I’m not feeling like smiling – I’m nervous and on edge and there’s very definitely nothing funny about this. Still I try. I put on what I fondly imagine is my sardonic, half amused, half whimsical grin (an exotic expression that is supposed to be marked by the slightest up-tilt of the corner’s of my mouth, but usually ends up looking like someone has pinned the sides of my face into a straight line with a couple of drawing pins). The photographers says “Smile” again. I’m miffed. I am smiling, you cretin. Give a man a camera with a phallic looking lens and suddenly he’s an art critic. What does he know? Did Mona Lisa have to put up with this sort of thing? By now my lightly amused smile has become a scowl. I feel like snarling. The photographer starts to say something else, then sees the tips of my canines starting to peep from under my lips and decides to let it be. He takes the snap. I come out looking like I’m biting down on a 440 Volt wire, but at least it’s over.

Digital cameras have made this even worse. At least in the old days there was hope. The guy took your snap and told you to come back in a couple of days to collect them. You spent the time in between checking out the faces of models in apparel ads, fondly imagining that’s what you would look like. You had some vision of carrying the photographs in a special X-ray proof case so women wouldn’t see them and go wild. Then you went back and were handed four intimate close-ups of your bathroom mop. This, it seemed, was you. You sighed. Life went on.

Now there’s no such hope. Ten seconds after the crime has been done, there it is on the computer screen, staring back at you with an expression that says “it’s your face that’s done this to me! I’m going to sue!”. Worse, there’s actually the choice of trying again. Like that’s going to help.

Take yesterday. I’m in the license centre getting a new photo ID. The woman at the counter tells me to sit back in the chair and takes a quick snap. Next thing it’s up on her computer screen (with all the ten people behind me in line watching) and she’s asking me to check it. What am I supposed to say? No, that’s not me. There must have been some mistake with the paperwork somewhere. I’m actually Brad Pitt? If I say “yes, that’s fine” she’s going to look at me like – is THAT what you really want to look like on government records? So you’re admitting that that’s your actual FACE? Do you know what the penalty for being so gawky is in the state of Pennyslvania? If say “err..no, could we try that again?” I’m practically admitting to being both vain and deluded. I sigh and say, that’s fine. She prints my photo ID out, hands it to me. I am now officially a ghoul. I imagine emergency medics checking to see if I’m an organ donor and then taking one look at my face and deciding that it’s not worth it.

Once, just once, I’d like to have a passport photograph that didn’t look like a cat taking out its frustrations on a badly stuffed sofa. Is that too much to ask?

P.S. On a seperate note, I’ve never really understood why people are so obsessed with the way their passport size snaps come out. I mean it would be nice to look good in the snap, but I wouldn’t put actual effort into it (like combing my hair, for instance – a ritual I undertake on a strictly quarterly basis). I know people who will get a complete facial done just because they need to have a photograph taken. Or will buy a new shirt so that the collar looks freshly starched. This seems a little excessive, to say the least. I mean at the end of the day as long as people can recognise you it doesn’t matter how you look, right? I mean they’re not going to take a look at my ID in a bar and say “We’re sorry, you’re the right age, but you’re too ugly to drink”. They won’t, will they?

A post on Megha’s blog set me thinking about that trite Erich Segal quote: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”. Personally, I think that line is the perfect example of what I call Hallmark poetry – the kind of trite phrase-making that sounds really profound and wonderful until you start thinking about it and realise that it means absolutely nothing whatsoever. This is standard greeting-card fare, but it’s also the kind of thing that the writing of Kahlil Gibran is full of, for instance*. Personally, I find it hard to believe that people actually treasure homilies like this, let alone actually spend time thinking about them.

That said, the question I’ve always wanted to ask ever since I first read that line was – does it work in reverse? If I never have to say I’m sorry, does that mean I’m in love? Is that what the Republican party means when it says it loves this country? Does this mean I’m having a torrid affair with the irritating cafetaria server who I’m always rude to and never apologise? Think about all the people I never feel the need to apologise to – NASCAR fans, people who get to the parking spot after me, all the fellow diners at a restaurant who ordered before me and are still waiting for their food. Could it be that I secretly love all these people? That my seeming indifference to them is simply a front for a deep-rooted yearning? And if being unapologetic is the true mark of affection than I’m surely a lover to equal Casanova.

Okay, okay, so I’m rambling. It’s been that kind of day. I’d apologise, but I love you all too much!

P.S. In other news, its seems my neighbourhood aunty-jis had the right idea all along. Isn’t science wunnerful?**

Notes:

* Gibran’s position has always struck me as a strange one – it’s hard to take him seriously as either a poet or a philosopher. The best that one can say for him is that he sounds nice and is really useful for sending ’special’ greetings to cousins who wouldn’t know poetry if it came and nibbled on their toes while they were sleeping but expect to be congratulated on their marriages / babies / house-warmings and other such unfortunate accidents with the choicest purple prose from yours truly.

** There’s a vicious canard going around that I’m a fairly nifty gossip monger myself. This is entirely untrue, of course. It’s a horrible lie spread by J (whose wife keeps Fed-ex-ing herself little packages in a desperate attempt to seduce the delivery guy – so far with little success) and P (who spends every morning at the hairdressers getting a thirty minute comb-over).

A combination of yesterday’s post and a post on a friend’s blog that quoted an Ogden Nash poem, made me think of one of my favourite distinctions – the concept of sins of omission vs. sins of commision. Ogden Nash puts this brilliantly:

Portrait Of The Artist As A Prematurely Old Man

It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shuddha.
I might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin as long as, in a way, against each other we are pitting them,
And that is, don’t bother your head about the sins of commission because however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn’t be committing them.
It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,
That lays eggs under your skin.
The way you really get painfully bitten
Is by the insurance you haven’t taken out and the checks you haven’t added up the stubs of and the appointments you haven’t kept and the bills you haven’t paid and the letters you haven’t written.
Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of beauty,
Namely, it isn’t as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night every time you neglected to do your duty;
You didn’t get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;
You didn’t slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,
Let’s all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round of unwritten letters is on me.
No, you never get any fun
Out of things you haven’t done,
But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,
Because the suitable things you didn’t do give you a lot more trouble than the unsuitable things you did.
The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.

- Ogden Nash

While this may seem like a flippant distinction (and certainly in Nash’s ever capable hands a hilarious one), I think there’s an extremely important point here. One of the central tenets by which I try to live my life is the idea that it’s better to try something and not have it work out than to not try it at all (WARNING: anyone who even thinks of quoting Tennyson at this point is just ASKING for a juicy punch in the eye). The reason for this is that the things you don’t get around to doing are easily idealised. If you try something and it doesn’t work out you then know that it hasn’t worked out and can put it behind you; but if you don’t try it at all it grows quickly into something larger than life – a spectre that blots out the meek sun of your happiness, a regret that will not go away*. Thoreau writes in Walden:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. “

That’s it exactly – it’s not the life you live that you regret, it’s all the lives you don’t. Empson writes:

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

Notes:

* I don’t really agree with the whole notion of regrets anyway – but that’s a topic for another post

** Some of you will see the similarity between this and Type I and Type II error – false negatives and false positives. I guess my overall philosophy is that it’s better to have false positives than to have false negatives – purely because the really important and wonderful things in life are much rarer and so missing out on those is much more costly then being taken in by a few mirages along the way.

One of the most lingering side-effects of working for the Firm is an undeniable fascination with putting things into 2×2 matrices. No sooner has a thought occured to you or a problem presented itself than you start casting around for ways to express it in two dichotomous dimensions. There’s something strangely comforting about being able to fit everything into those four little squares – as if the world were at once controllable and interesting. This is not about trying to be clever – it’s just how some of us naturally think. The average Firm employee will not spend time plucking petals from flower saying ’she loves me / she loves me not’, he will make a 2×2 matrix with ‘She loves me’ one one axis and ‘I love her’ on the other and classify all the women he knows along those two dimensions!

So comments on an earlier post about the difference between trolls and gnomes made me instantly start thinking of ways to make the distinction more interesting by expressing it as a matrix. The result draws heavily upon an apocryphal classification scheme prevalent in the Firm – only the names for the individual cells are my own.

Essentially this elegantly simple classification scheme has two dimensions: Taking yourself too seriously and trying too hard. The interaction of the two gives us the following figure.

Trolls are dull, silent creatures, secure and self-righteous. Typically lacking in any sense of humour whatsoever, Trolls are usually content to live their own insular and smug lives, and rarely inflict their opinions on other people. However, they are extremely sensitive to things that they see as attacking their values / beliefs and are quick to take offense at things that are said against them. They have an almost morbid fear of being made to look ridiculous and are unappreciative of jokes at their expense. These fears / hurts express themselves as disengagement rather than confrontation, however – Trolls are the ultimate passive-aggressives. Because they are afraid of being shown up, Trolls will tend not to react openly to negative stimuli, preferring to let a simmering resentment grow within them. Interestingly, Trolls are often pious and ’sincere’ though this is a fake sincerity that is based on complacency rather than humility. Because their puny brains are often incapable of dealing with contradiction, Trolls have trouble respecting / considering other people’s opinions and prefer a ’simple’ if suffocating world view where they are always right.

Gnomes are possibly the most annoying of all creatures in this matrix. Opinionated and belligerent, Gnomes will seek out views that run contrary to their own without provocation, and proceed to attack them with all the bitterness they can muster. While Gnomes may often be full of biting wit, they have no real sense of humour, simply because they will never make (and usually cannot take) jokes at their own expense – humour to them is more a weapon than a toy. Driven by insecurity, Gnomes will constantly seek opportunities to assert their own points of view, but will be unwilling to listen to others and will react to opposing positions based more on emotional frenzy than on rational thought. Gnomes will never admit to being wrong. Logic is wasted on gnomes because they are selective listeners and will use it only to support conclusions that favour them – never considering how the same argument could be used against them. Gnomes are incapable of seeing things from the other point of view. The average Gnome suffers from a strong persecution complex and is extremely self-involved – to the point of assuming that everything in the world is somehow about him / her.

Pixies are the featherbrains of the world. Generous and good of heart, Pixies are anxious to please and desperate for acceptance. Rather than being self-involved, Pixies are infact almost entirely externally involved – they often have no discernible opinions / talents / personalities of their own, but always seem to be in search of external validation. While they are the most likely to make jokes (including jokes about themselves) their jokes are usually more notable for their quantity rather than their quality. Pixies are wanna-bes – strivers have no real personality and usually an extremely limited depth of understanding about the things that they talk about – yet silence makes them uncomfortable and they are often uncomfortable being alone. Unlike Gnomes, who are convinced that everyone hates them, Pixies cannot stand the thought that anyone could hate them and are therefore almost self-effacing in their desire to please – they arrange away confrontations. While pixies may have little faith in their own worth, they may often be convinced that other people find them charming and intelligent and believe that effort is all it takes to be respected – not realising how silly and cloying they may seem. Pixies can be annoying, but you cannot bring yourself to hate them – you know that they mean well and you often like them, but you cannot begin to take them seriously.

Elves are, of course, the most aspirational of all the life-forms in this model. Like Trolls, Elves are little concerned with what other people think about them, but unlike Trolls they are secure enough to admit that other people could be right. Elves have a great sense of humour and will laugh at themselves as much as they will laugh at others – they are intensely aware of both the world’s absurdity and of their own ridiculousness. Frequently clever and talented, Elves use these gifts in a whimsical manner, often more interested in the effects / process than in the final meaning of what they come in with. Relativists by nature, Elves are uncomfortable with moral absolutes, and tend to take a more contingent view of the world. While they may often be interested in arts and culture, Elves seek these out more for their own pleasure than in order to impress others / be accepted by them. Even though they recognise that they might be wrong, Elves are not afraid to state their opinions on various issues, though they may be willing to change this opinion if they find a convincing argument that suggests a better one. Open and friendly, Elves have strong personalities, but see no reason to inflict them on other people unless asked to.

Interesting article about Matisse’s life in the New York Review of Books.

Hilary Spurling writes about the terrible irony that the one place where Matisse is least revered is in his own home town.

It was a shock to find, on my first visit to his home town of Bohain-en-Vermandois, that nobody had ever heard of him. “Matys? Mathis?” asked the local lawyer, whose firm had once represented Matisse’s father from an office that still stands a few hundred yards from the house where the painter grew up. “How are you spelling that? With an h, or with a y?” Gradually I began to meet an older generation, people in their seventies and eighties whose parents and grandparents had talked about the Matisse boy as a kind of village idiot—le sot Matisse—a dropout with a record of successive failures, who ran away to Paris in the end to be a painter. “Madame, have you seen his paintings?” one old lady asked me in 1991. “A child could paint better than that, Madame.” At the art school in St. Quentin, where the young Matisse enrolled in secret for drawing lessons without telling his father, the elderly college principal was still so bitterly ashamed of his only celebrated ex-student that he could barely bring himself to pronounce the name.

(Note to future terrorists: If you are going to attack some place in France, could you take this town out first? Thanks awfully. )

Spurling argues that to disassociate the artist’s life (especially the life of a painter as raw and emotional as Matisse) from his work is to rob that work of a critical emotional context. Spurling’s new biography of Matisse attempts to move beyond this artificial barrier and look more closely at Matisse as a human being.

“The invisible man who emerged from my researches was passionate, generous, and driven. Far from being humorless or heartless, he could be extremely funny, a first-rate mimic and raconteur (Matisse potrayed himself in private all his life in a stream of absurd, scratchy, self-mocking cartoons), as well as a loyal friend, endlessly and unobtrusively kind to those in trouble, especially to fellow painters. Admittedly, he was also almost impossible to live with. The sheer relentless force and intensity of his energy at close quarters made him intolerable at times. “

I’m not sure I agree with this. That is to say, I think it makes sense if you’re writing a biography of the man (certainly his emotional life is more than relevant then) but I’m not sure why you would do so in the first place. The point about Matisse is not whether he was humiliated by scandal or made miserable by war, the point about Matisse is his art. Matisse’s paintings don’t need to be provided with emotional context, they make their own. The raw energy bursting out of his canvasses is a context enough, if you open your heart to it.

I guess I’ve always been sceptical about the whole genre of artist’s biographies. I think they’re an interesting form of writing in themselves, but I’m chary of claims that say they enhance or inform your appreciation of the artist’s work. I see them as a sort of sophisticated voyeurism. Art, I feel, should be evaluated on its own terms and not in terms of what was happening to the artist at the time. What was happening to the artist may be interesting in itself, but it has nothing to do with his art.

Reading the Booker Long List made me realise how incredible an year it’s been for novels by writers I care for. At least half the authors still writing whose work I love have published in the last 12 months. 2004-05 has seen new books by (in descending order of importance to me): J.M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Imre Kertesz, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Colm Toibin and Julian Barnes. Not to mention the new Marilynne Robinson. And the new Irving and Ishiguro novels (both of whom I find readable but far from exciting).

My cup runneth over.

In other news, Sitemeter informs me that if you go to google and type in “asexual relationship” it gives you a link to this blog. Great. So much for my dating life.

And to think of some of the things people complain about.