Came across this interview of Woody Allen via a link from Uma, where the man obsesses about how he’s not a serious enough film maker and how he wishes he was doing something more dramatic or tragic.

Now understand, I say this as someone who WORSHIPS Allen, has seen pretty much all his movies (except for a couple made for TV), relates insanely to his characters and in general thinks the man is one of the most profoundly funny people around: His serious movies suck. I mean, September had all the poetry and tension of a poem by Percy Gorringe, and if the video libraries in hell ever run out of copies of Ishtar, I’m sure Another Woman will be next on their list of selections to offer their clientele.

Bottomline: Allen is not Bergman, no matter how much he would like to be. And conversely, Bergman is not Allen, Smiles of a Summer Night notwithstanding. Allen couldn’t have made The Silence any more than Bergman could have made Zelig. It’s just division of labour – it makes sense.

Imagine what would have happened, for instance, if the great philosophers had decided that they’d rather be funny. Think of the disaster it would have been:

Socrates: “The only thing I know about being funny is that it’s serious business. Get it? Serious business. Ha! Ha! But seriously, folks. What’s that? You want me to what? Drink what? Oh wow! you’re a tough crowd, aren’t you? Ha! Ha! Very funny! What, you’re serious? No, no, wait. Have I told you the one about Aesculapius’s cock yet? Oh, damn!”

Plato: “Man walks into a bar and asks for a Bud Light. The bartender tells him they don’t have any. The man says he’ll take any other light beer. The bartender says all they have is Guinness. The man look at him and says, ‘What? No Light? What are you – cavemen?”

Sartre: “What do you call a consciousness of the self that doesn’t exist? A super model. What do you call the existence of a self that isn’t conscious? Drunk.”

Heraclitus: “Why did the duck cross the road? Because the river just wasn’t the same any more.”

Kant: “How do you get an elephant into a refrigerator? You reason it in. How do you get an elephant out of a refrigerator? You ask yourself if this joke would be any funnier if it was all the elephants in the world instead of just this one elephant. It wouldn’t, so the elephant shouldn’t be in the refrigerator in the first place.”

Nietzsche: *Nudge-Nudge* *Wink-Wink* “God is Dead. Pass it on.”

Hegel: “Knock! Knock! Who’s there? Thesis. Thesis who? Not this is who, you moron, who is this?; Knock! Knock! Who’s there? Antithesis. Antithesis who? Aunty this is Bunty from next door, I was wondering if Raju was in?; Knock! Knock! Who’s there? Synthesis. Synthesis who? Syn this is the last of these stupid jokes I don’t really need to be funny do I?”

Hobbes: “What do you get if you put a small monkey, a pair of scissors and your favourite trousers into a washing machine? Something bloody and brutish. And shorts.”

Descartes: “So then I said to the waiter – ‘What do you mean? This is Chinatown isn’t it? Cogito ergo dim-sum.”

Marx: “Then I said to her, I said: Honey, (mark this), Honey, you look beautiful just as you are. You don’t need all this jewelry. You’re in class for yourself as it is. Come away. You have nothing to lose. Except these chains.”

See what I mean? NOT a happy thought.

A follow-up of sorts to yesterday’s post (not really, but what the hell):

What, exactly, is the deal with this whole maturity thing? People are always telling me to grow up, be more mature (it’s been the constant plaint of everyone I’ve ever dated, for example – I’m convinced that there are certified courses out there that will teach any prospective girlfriend of mine how to say / imply that I’m immature in 563 different ways; boy, they must be short of business) – as though becoming more mature were like buying a car or leasing a house – one of those things where you sign on the dotted line and you’re done. Would someone care to define for me what exactly maturity consists of? How is it measured? How can it be tested empirically? What precisely does it mean?

People will tell you that maturity is about looking at the big picture, being able to see what’s important, what matters, being able to prioritise. What they really mean, though, is prioritising what they think is important, what they think matters. It’s always seemed to me that maturity is just a fancy word for whether someone agrees with you or not. It’s always easier, when faced with someone who has a different point of view, to undermine their credibility by accusing them of being immature, rather than acknowledging their point of view for what it is and then trying to reconcile / argue out your differences.

Take a simple example. Say you were married to someone and you found out that they’d mutilated one of your books. Say they’d scribbled all over it, or had torn some pages out or had used it as a coaster and ended up spilling water on it. Would this be sufficient grounds for divorce? (I don’t mean that legally – just conceptually) Or would it be ‘immature’ of you to get hot and bothered over a book, breaking up what is arguably the most important relationship of your life? “It’s just a book”, people will tell you, “what’s the big deal. Grow up.” Now consider the case where you’re married to someone and you find out they’ve been sleeping with someone else. Is that sufficient grounds for divorce? Let’s say they refuse to be nice to your family. Is that sufficient grounds?[1]

Most people, I suspect, would argue that the latter two cases are valid reasons to end a marriage, but the damaged book is not. I disagree. Respect for books is important to me – they’re pretty much the only thing in the world I do respect – so I would rather live with adultery or with asocial behaviour than live with someone who I can’t trust to take care of my books[2]. Does this make me immature? And if so, why? I’m not saying you have to agree with my prioritisation – I’m only saying that that’s what matters to me. What’s so special about some values, some beliefs, that makes them more mature than others?

I’m not saying that disagreements aren’t a problem. Clearly if you’re married to someone and you think books matter and they think sexual exclusivity does, you’ve got something you need to work out. My point is simply that it needs to be a working out between equals – a negotiation that recognises the claims of both points of view. To simply say that the other person is immature may be, ironically enough, the most immature argument of all.

[1] For the purposes of the thought experiment, assume that this is the only problem you have and everything else is fine and you’re really happy in every other way. Obviously, this is likely to be untrue since these actions are likely to be symptoms of a graver malaise, but assume for the sake of the argument that there’s no such signalling value. Oh, also, I’m not saying that a divorce is the first or only option you should try, just whether, all else failing, it would make sense.

[2] By implication, actually trusting someone else with my books is as close to a declaration of love as I can get. Mom, Dad, the next time you complain about how I keep buying more books and leave them all back in India for you to take care of, think about that.

You now how when you’re little people are always asking you what you want to be when you grow up? Most people use that question as little more than a conversation starter (as if it’s possible to start a conversation with a child, as if you’d want to – why not move straight to arson?) but it’s always struck me as being a deeply serious and intensely problematic question. What do I want to be when I grow up? I don’t have a clue.

The suggestion has been made, of course (generally by people who know me only slightly) that I am already grown up. As anyone who is a regular reader of this blog knows, this is a base canard (are there no limits to what people will say? Don’t they realise the potential consequences of this kind of loose gossip?) – I certainly don’t think of myself as being Grown Up. It’s possible, of course, that this is a form of denial – not so much of my own mortality, as of the notion that this is all that being grown up might consist of. There’s a line somewhere in Kerouac where he says “I have nothing to offer you but my own confusion”. That’s more or less how I feel most of the time, and I’d rather not believe (despite the evidence to the contrary) that this is all being grown up really consists of – a brave front, the ability to say the same stupid things, except with more authority. And isn’t the fact that I still cling to my ideals of grown-upness proof that I’m not a grown-up yet?

But enough crazy talk. I finally realised, this morning, what I want to be when I grow up. No really, it just came to me, don’t ask me why, there was this sudden flash behind my eyes and there it was: I want to be Robert De Niro. Not the old Robert De Niro of Meet the Parents and Analyze That, no, but the young man he’s a caricature of – the De Niro from all those Scorsese movies, from Mean Streets and New York, New York, and Goodfellas and Taxi Driver and Raging Bull; the De Niro who played the young Vito Corleone, the De Niro from Cape Fear; the De Niro who was not so much a man as an attitude, a blistering, loose-limbed, in-your-face state of mind. Just once, just for one day, I’d like to be that malignant, that creepy, that obsessive. That intense. That thoroughly no good. Just once I’d like to be taken that seriously; just once I’d like to walk into a bar and feel the room get nervous around me. Just once I’d like to be able to take myself that seriously. Just once I’d like to be that raffishly charming, that outgoing, that impossible to say no to. Just once I’d like to be that cool.

And people say I’m grown up. Ha!

P.S. Thinking about it, if De Niro’s already taken, I wouldn’t mind settling for Kerouac. If I really had to, that is.

Have you ever had the experience where you hear someone talking around you and have this urge to step over and slap them out of their stupidity?

Like the other day at the Met’s Van Gogh exhibition there was this twenty-something who was loudly proclaiming that she didn’t see what the big deal was and she could have painted this herself and how this whole Van Gogh thing was mostly hype. Or the young woman sitting behind me at the Dianne Reeves concert on Saturday who went on about how she loved the third LOTR movie because it had such great action and that Aragorn guy looked so cute, but she thought the first movie was sssoooo boring [1] – apparently they just walked and talked and walked and talked – and overall would pick Harry Potter over Tolkien any day. People like that deserve to be roasted over a slow fire, preferably in their own moisturising creams.

That’s why I’m so amused when people talk about the population problem. To me, the solution is obvious – just get rid of all the cretins who don’t deserve to live anyway, and there’ll be plenty of natural resources to go around between the few million people left (though, of course, most of them will still want to live in New York, so it won’t help Manhattan rents much).

Also, have you ever come across one of those stupid posters / mementos that say things like “It takes 456 muscles to frown, it takes only 6 muscles to smile”, as though efficiency of muscle use were the only reason to be sad or happy. It always makes me want to ask – how many muscles does it take to be a moron?

Right. Now to get through the rest of the week.

[1] In the interests of disclosure I should say that the first LOTR movie was the only one I could really stand. Okay, so they left Tom Bombadil out and Liv Tyler got her stupid star turn, but at least they didn’t actively corrupt the meaning / logic of the book; after what they did to the Ents in the second movie I never found the heart to forgive them.

As I got to my office coffee machine this morning (yes, I know it’s Sunday – but we PhD students are beyond such trivialities as days of the week) it occured to me (for no reason in particular) that someone may have placed a small crystal of lethal poison at the tip of the dispenser, so that the poison would dissolve into the next cup of coffee that came out of the machine and the person drinking it would be dead in a few hours. The idea seemed so real for a moment that I almost considered going without coffee. Almost.

That way madness lies; let me shun that

Midnight. I sit waiting on the balcony, my back to the metal railing, feeling the coldness of it criss-cross against my spine. The smell of ash in the air. The smell of the night itself, like damp paper.

Waiting for the moment, for the moonbeam. Waiting for the stars to arrange themselves to their own satisfaction. The sound of the traffic like a distant river – the ebb and flow of a world where the darkness is still orchestratated by streetlights – a world I am no longer part of. The unexpected coolness of the marble floor. I hold my knife up to my face and try to see my eyes in its blade. The blade shines silver, glints back at me, sharp as the eyes of a cat. It is a good sign. It means the stars are thirsty too, it means they will help. It means they will not be satisfied till the reflection of their loneliness is stilled in blood.

I think about how old the bones of the moon must be. As I watch, a solitary moonbeam advances upon the door, like a finger, like a key. As it touches the keyhole, I hear the reluctant click of ancient clockwork, and the great stone door swings soundlessly open. I can enter now. It is time.

The first thing that strikes me as I enter the house is the thickness of the air, its nine hundred year old sweetness. Even the bees would die, carrying mouthfuls of this air back to their hives. The floor is so thick with dust that every footstep becomes a ghost trying to rise up from beneath the ground, raising its spectral hands towards me, subsiding in my wake. I feel as if I were treading on silence itself. It occurs to me that this is how God must collect in the hearts of men, not a weight but a deposit, the sediment of history. I can feel the reluctance in my feet, the resistance of the dust to my approach. If I did not have the knife with me, its point raised and listening like an ear, I would have turned back.

I go further. The darkness closes in now, the doorway with its promise of moonlight has been left behind. It does not matter though. No directions count here, this place is hunger. You cannot see your way through this house, you can only imagine it, and in the corridors of the imagination where the ghosts of flame burn in twisted, forgotten shapes, there is always light.

Two corridors down, I hear the music. Billie Holiday. The sweet, sad ache of the note, like the clarity of water drawn from a dark, deep well. The sound is faint at first, but as I follow it grows louder, the music swelling, soaring, lifting the roofbeams of this house so that it finally feels as though there may be space here to breathe. My steps are quicker now – my purpose defined at last, I hurry through the echoing passageways with an anxiety that is truer than a knife, cobwebs brush against me like strands of premonition but I break my way through and pay them no heed.

The room, when I finally reach it, is lit by a chandeleir of mournful candles that sit huddled on its great metal branches like bedraggled birds leaving the carpet underneath thick with their wax droppings. As I enter I notice a piano in the corner and an old man by the fireplace, warming his hands. He is wearing a tattered red dressing gown, with a Pheonix embroidered on its back in gold. On a table just inside the entrance there is an old-fashioned radio, its neon dial glowing a sickly green. That’s where the music is coming from. I look down at the radio and discover that the tuner is broken and the station is set permanently to Nostalgia.

There’s a bed in the very centre of the room, where a young boy lies sleeping. As I approach, I am struck by his intense, incandescent beauty, by the way the exquisite pallor of his skin rises so effortlessly out of the grey lifelessness of the bedsheets. By the fullness of those lips, the tenderness of that cheek, the delicate calligraphy of those eyelashes. By the eyes closed like trembling buds, wanting only the soft call of Spring to burst into life again. There is something innocent about this face, something pure and almost holy, as though Time himself would hesitate to touch so frail a loveliness. He looks so young, so tender, that it is hard to believe that he has lain like this for centuries, until I realise that the carpet I thought I was walking on is actually his hair.

When I stop beside the bed the old man looks across at me for a moment, his glance as wily as a frightened sparrow. He has been warming his hands before that fire for a good ten minutes since I entered, but his fingers are still trembling. It is clear that he has seen my knife, and is afraid. Thinking about him makes the world come flooding back, the consciousness of my surroundings, that I had lost in gazing at the boy, returns. These foolish things remind me of you the voice on the radio sings. I feel as though I am being watched. I glance over at the old man again, but he has turned away, is sitting hunched and miserable over the fire. Who else then? Tensing, I whirl about quickly, take in the room. No one. Oh how the ghost of you clings. It occurs to me that the presence I am feeling is the radio. Sitting there so assured, so complacent. A leer stuck on its face. I realise I have to switch the radio off before I can go on with what has to be done. No witnesses. The man who ordered the killing was very clear about that.

As I advance upon the radio a second time, the sound of it seems to grow louder, surround me. We’d be so grand at the game, the voice sings, so happy together that it does seem a shame, the music drowning out everything else, that you can’t see your future with me, as I reach for the switch I hear what sounds like a distant howl behind me, I turn and see the old man gesturing frantically at me, his lips moving, ’cause you’d be oh, so easy to love. I turn the radio off.

And suddenly I’m standing in the middle of a vast and empty landscape, a desert stretching away on every side of me, the stars distant and cold. The boy and the piano and the room have all vanished, only the old man in his garish dressing gown is still here, tottering towards me over the sand. “What happened?”, I ask him as he draws closer, “where did the boy go?” (I have a job to do, after all). “They’re all gone”, the old man says, his voice like the squeak of an unoiled hinge, “the boy and the room and the house and the world it was all contained in; all gone because you turned off that radio and destroyed them forever”. “The radio?”, I ask, the suprise plain in my voice. “Yes, the radio. Don’t you see that that radio was the only thing connecting that room to the ancient world that it was once part of, that the music was the only thing keeping that house alive? When you turned off the radio you broke that link, and nine hundred years of desire crumbled away into dust. I hope you’re happy. Why didn’t you just kill the boy? I thought that was what you had come for?”. I nodded. “It was”, I said, but he had already turned away from me, was already walking away, headed towards a horizon that was visible only as a thin line of contrast, a hairline fracture in the blank bone of the distance.

After he was gone, I listened very carefully to the silence, hoping to hear a songbird sing. When nothing came, though, I shrugged my shoulders and lay down right there on the sand, and pulled the desert over me like a blanket and fell asleep and dreamed of a neon-green face, glowing faintly in the darkness.

A recent post by heh heh (all 17 of him) made me think about the various ways in which we as a society sanction cruel and inhuman treatment of various food groups every day of our lives. Just think about the way we puree tomatoes, for instance, or dice carrots, without any concern for their feelings or the effect that such torture could have on their families.

In particular, I’m concerned about a food group very near to my heart – chocolate. It’s truly horrendous the kind of tortures you see chocolate being put to every day. Enter any half-decent cafe in New York and you’ll see perfectly good, well-educated chocolate being set upon by raspberries and blueberries and other assorted tropical fruit, and being able to do nothing about it. Such treatment is worse than insulting – it’s downright barbaric. And what about those patronising chefs who grate the chocolate into tiny pieces and sprinkle it lightly over some putridly fruity confection, as though chocolate had no identity of its own and could be usurped to anyone else’s service. Or the restaurants back in India that will serve you Bournvita and claim it’s Hot Chocolate. What about Bournvita itself? What about all these biscuits and cereal bars and toffees pretending to be chocolate and corrupting the taste buds of young and old alike? Whatever happened to the dignity of chocolate? How did we go from being a culture where chocolate was treated with the respect and gravity it deserved, to the point where it has become little more than a flavouring, a frail yes-man reduced to mere flattery of our ever more insolent taste-buds.

Some people will argue that its chocolate itself that has become more subservient, more cloying. Schooled in the insouciant tradition of Hershey’s and Snickers, today’s chocolate is a mealy-mouthed spineless thing, a grovelling excuse for a food-group that deserves the contempt it receives. Yet who is to blame for this deterioration in the moral fibre of chocolate? Is it not a socio-economic system that has systematically marginalised chocolate interests, forcing chocolates to prostitute themselves if they are to survive as active members of the foodstuff community? Is it not the lack of an appropriately nurturing environment, the ridiculous prejudice against chocolates enshrined in the canons of weight-watchers everywhere, the blatant preference shown by young people today for things like fruit and grain, which can never hope to match up to the sophistication, the quiet distinction of the true chocolate bar?

Where is the public debate on this issue? Where are the NGOs? Where are the lobbyists? How can so vital a component of our food-groups be disenfranchised and no one care? How indifferent have we become as citizens, as members of society?

All is not lost however. You still see them – whispering together in confectionaries, waiting patiently in duty-free shops at airports – bars of true chocolate, the kind that have not abandoned the proud traditions of their forefathers, but cling bravely to there identity as chocolates – international dissidents riding as the vanguard of a chocolate Revolution that is bound to come.

Let us join hands with these chocolates, let us show them our solidarity. Let us boycott those restaurants and cafes that would enslave chocolate in the name of bananas or mangos. Let us demand equal rights for chocolates everywhere, let us look into the plight of chocolates in China, in Iraq, let us cry out for greater representation for chocolates on city councils and in parliament. Let us make sure that each and every chocolate is assured its true and honest place in the pantheon of food.

How is all this to be achieved you ask? Time is short and there is much to do, so I won’t go into the details here – except to mention briefly my plan to set up an International Society for the Prevention for Cruelty to Chocolate. For those of you who wish to support our cause, however, there are many smaller ways in which you can already begin to make a difference. As the Christmas season approaches, chocolates everywhere will be lonelier than ever. Show them you care. Make them feel special. Take a chocolate home today.

Another quickie (it’s that kind of day):

Every now and then Sitemeter will inform me that someone new has added a link to my blog. While I’m not particularly anxious about the readership of this blog, this always makes me happy – it’s nice to know that someone else likes / enjoys what you’re writing. Plus it makes the pretense that this blog is written for other people and isn’t just about me being a narcissist with a poor memory that much more credible. And it’s proved a useful way of identifying new blogs that it might be interesting to follow. (Not to mention that having more readers means that there’s a higher probability that at least someone reading what I write will be deeply insulted.)

Take this person, for instance, who added me to his blogroll yesterday (or at least, yesterday was the first day that I saw the referral come through). I was mildly pleased to be mentioned on his blog, I would almost say I was grateful. Just one minor problem: MY NAME IS NOT FLAGSTAFF!!!!!!! It’s Falstaff. Falstaff as in Prince Hal, Falstaff as in “The better part of valour is discretion”, Falstaff as in the happiest, most life-affirming and least principled character that Shakespeare ever wrote. Falstaff who (as Harold Bloom has so cogently argued) is not Prince Hamlet, but his exact counterpoint; Falstaff, who is, in Eliot’s incredible words:

“an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.”

Falstaff. Not some stupid pole to fly a country’s rags from. Not flagstaff (flagstaff forsooth!) Falstaff.

AAAARRRGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, I promised myself (and half a dozen other people) that I would get off this morbid Death theme, so this is going to be a quick one. All Black Mamba’s fault for reminding me of my all time favourite way to die.

Read Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking two days ago and am still trying to recover (the fact that my preferred recovery mode involves reading Plath and Kawabata probably isn’t helping). So decided to make a list of top 10 mourning poems (in no particular order)

1. W. H. Auden ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

2. Milton ‘Lycidas‘

Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

3. Shelley, ‘Adonais‘

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
He hath awakened from the dream of life—
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings.—We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

4. Allen Ginsberg ‘Kaddish’

Nothing beyond what we have–what you had–that so pitiful–yet Tri-
umph,to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower–fed to the
ground–but made, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe,
shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth
wrapped, sore–freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless.

No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the
knife

5. Rilke ‘The Duino Elegies’

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.

6. Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam’

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

7. Sappho, ‘Fragment 62′

Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea, what shall we do?
Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your tunics [1]

8. Shakespeare ‘Full Fathom Five’

Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

9. Whitman ‘When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d’

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars, and ghostly pines so still.[2]

10. Dylan Thomas ‘A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London’

After the first death, there is no other.

Notes

[1] See also Franny’s letter in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey.

I think I’m beginning to look down on all poets except Sappho. I’ve been reading her like mad, and no vulgar remarks, please. I may even do my term thing on her if I decide to go out for honors and if I can get the moron they assigned me as an advisor to let me. “Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea, what shall we do? Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your tunics.” Isn’t that marvellous? She keeps doing that, too.

[2] Clearly, I’m channelling The Waste Land – first the Shakespeare, which always makes me think of Death by Water; and then this, which the whole “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” stanza in What the Thunder Said so eerily echoes.