Irony watch

One Mr. Douglas Preston in the NYT article on the rising prices of e-books:

“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”

Pune

I think Nitin Pai hits the bull's eye here:

And yet, a significant element of Maharashtra’s law enforcement machinery was not engaged in securing the state against a potential terrorist attack. It was engaged in securing the state against potential hooligan attacks. If there was ever a time to hold the Shiv Sena and its grotesque leadership to account, it is now.

Aamir Khan and BHL

My hatred of Aamir Khan, as my friends well know, knows no bounds. Still, I thought that these words from Arthur Goldhammer on the insufferable French New Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy (or BHL, as he is known to his admirers; his detractors are far funnier though!) are equally applicable to Khan (just change the context from writing to acting):

“How does he pull it off?” wrote Goldhammer. “First, it must be recognized that he's not a total fraud. Though a wretched scholar, he is neither stupid nor uneducated. His rhetoric, at least in French, has some of the old Normalien brilliance and flair. He had the wit to recognize before anyone else that a classic French role, that of the universal intellectual as moral conscience of the age, had become a media staple, creating a demand that a clever entrepreneur could exploit. He understood that it was no longer necessary first to prove one's mettle in some field of literature, art, or thought. I think that someone once said of Zsa Zsa Gabor that she was ‘famous for being famous.’ Lévy realized that one could be famous for being righteous, and that celebrity itself could establish a prima facie claim to righteousness.”

Righteous or not, BHL is certainly timely. His denunciations of Communism in the late 1970s were hardly original. But they appeared as the radical spirit of May ‘68 was exhausting itself -- and just before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chinese party’s own denunciations of late-period Maoism. BHL developed a knack for showing up in war zones and sending out urgent dispatches. Last month he did a toe-touch in Georgia following the Russian invasion -- filing an article that was impassioned, if, it seems, imaginative.

“He chooses his causes shrewdly,” continues Goldhammer. “He may not have been the first to divine the waning of revolutionary radicalism, but he made himself revisionism's publicist. He has a knack for placing himself at the center of any scene and for depicting his presence as if it were what rendered the scene important.... His critics keep him constantly in the limelight and actually amplify his voice, and why should a ‘philosopher’ of universal range stoop to respond to ‘pedants’ who trouble the clarity of his vision with murky points of detail?” [emphasis mine]

3 Idiots: a brief comment

I disliked 3 Idiots intensely and indeed cringed through more than half of it but looking back, I can see that by the standards of contemporary Hindi movies, it is not at all a bad one. There is a certain slickness to the script and the direction (credited to Abhijat Joshi and Rajkumar Hirani), a couple of good jokes (the jokes are pitched at the level of a 5-year old but the audience around me found them funny), one truly moving scene (about which more later), pleasing performances by pleasing actors (Sharman Joshi, Madhavan and Kareena Kapoor) and of course the great Mr. Aamir Khan himself.

That last part, in case you didn't get it, was intended as sarcasm (the rest was sincere). Indeed 3 Idiots works best when the movie isn't busy adoring its star. Sadly, that would be may be 15 minutes of its running time. The rest is mostly scenes that consist of: (a) Aamir Khan telling people he likes how they ought to live their lives, or (b) Aamir Khan telling people he doesn't like how they ought to live their lives. (Oops, did I say Aamir Khan? I meant his character Rancho. But who am I kidding?) This gets a little wearying after a while since: (a) his intellectual adversaries are either bumbling or wicked or both. They get no good lines and don't offer much of a fight. Khan always has an answer! He's a genius, you see. (b) His friends are either bumbling or helpless or both. And boy, does he love to help! And boy, are they thankful! In fact, they worship the very ground he walks on.

If Khan took praise well, if he looked, oh let's say, just a wee bit embarrassed, this could still be interesting. Not. Aamir Khan, as an actor, is pathologically incapable of modesty. Indeed the more Rancho attains demi-god status in the movie, the more annoyingly smug he looks. Rebellion never had such a supremely self-satisfied avatar.

PS: Watch out for the scene at the very end between Madhavan's character Farhaan and his father, played by Parikshit Sahni. Probably the most touching father-son confrontation I've seen so far. And the song sequences pop and fizz.

A cooperative interviewer puts quotes in your mouth

Deborah Soloman interviews Jeff Bezos:

"Barnes & Noble claims on its Web site that the Nook has several advantages over the Kindle — for one thing, a Nook book can be lent to friends. You can forward the text to another user.

The current thing being talked about is extremely limited. You can lend to one friend. One time. You can’t pick two friends, not even serially, so once you’ve loaned one book to one friend, that’s it.

You have to pick just one person? What are you saying? It’s like “Sophie’s Choice”?

It is “Sophie’s Choice.” Very nicely done."

Is Maureen Dowd on drugs?

Or does she have ADD? Or does the New York Times not have an editor? Read her latest column. It is, as far as I could see, a bundle of disjointed sentences, with no coherent connection between them.

Quote of the day:

Christopher Orr on 2012:

At this point, I’m not sure which has become more tiresome: Roland Emmerich’s penchant for emotionally overwrought end-of-the-world pictures or his penchant for giving said pictures time-specific titles. With the exception of Godzilla, which advertised its subject with forthright specificity, his titles have exhibited a peculiar insistence on emphasizing the when at the expense of the what: Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and now 2012. (Even his relatively Armageddon-free caveman film--humankind evidently hadn’t yet built enough to bother annihilating--was called 10,000 B.C.) I shudder at the thought of such potential future projects as A Week from Thursday, Maybe Sometime in the New Year?, and Whenever.

The problem (so far) with Flash Forward

A couple of my friends recommended Flash Forward to me, and as I watched its second episode today (yay for on-demand TV!), I realized why Flash Forward had bugged me so far (the two episodes I've watched, that is). (Remember this is a strictly provisional opinion subject to change any time as I watch more.) So why am I not impressed?

(1) The almost complete absence of any danger:
So imagine this. For approximately two minutes, everyone in the world experiences a black-out for two minutes. Yes, they all become unconscious -- and if the series is to be believed, this leads to a spectacular disaster, on an unimagined scale. Airplanes crashing into buildings, cars running over people and crashing into buildings; the possibilities are endless. And yet, I get no sense from the series that anything serious has happened -- there's no destruction and everything seems to be right on track. WTF? Don't you remember the days after 9/11? Hell, I do, and I was in India and not even in the US -- it was probably what one could euphemistically call a very tense time. And this is a 100, a 1000 times worse -- and still nothing seems to have happened!

Which is why the investigation to find out how and why the flash forward happens (led by Joseph Fiennnes' character) seems to have no force at all. Why should we care really? Another flash forward happening would be just fine, it seems to me. And everyone can have even more cuddly little visions about their own future: what's not to like?

The super-success of Lost has brought on many Lost-like clones and Flash Forward is clearly one of them -- a wacky, vaguely sci-fi concept with a nice stereotypical array of characters. But if I remember anything from the beginning of Lost (the first few episodes of the first season are all I have seen of it), it's that there's a vivid sense of danger there: what's on the island? why are these people here? What's going to happen? I get no such feeling in Flash Forward -- but maybe that will change.

(2) And oh yes, the metaphysical bullshit: I mean, yes, it's fun to see the future, etc. and think what that means. Do we have free will or not? Are we in charge of our futures or are our futures in charge of us? But it's all bullshit (and absurdly pretentious) if I don't have a concrete sense of the stakes involved (see point (1) above, about Danger, lack of)

Line of the day

Pedro Almodovar on the kinds of movies he likes to make:

“No biopics,” he said firmly. “No biopics, no prequels, no sequels, no hero movies, no antihero movies, and definitely no superhero movies. Anything else I can handle.”

Sentence of the Day

James Wood on Richard Powers:

The fiction of Richard Powers sometimes resembles a dying satyr—above the waist is a mind full of serious thought, philosophical reflection, deep exploration of music and science; below, a pair of spindly legs strain to support the great weight of the ambitious brain.

Wood is (predictably) hard on Powers but the review is worth a read, just the same. See also this essay by William Deresiewicz.

Sigh, story of my life, part 2

I was skimming through Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming and Why It Matters this evening and in this passage -- about the perils of using RSS to read the news, pg. 339 -- he might very well be talking about me:

The story of RSS is an illustrative case. The opportunity to subscribe to a list of bloggers whose work you wanted to follow seemed like a perfect solution to the problem of blog indigestion. Instead, users took it as an invitation to load themselves up with an unmanageable influx of reading material. Each day they found their RSS reader confronting them with an intimidating message: You have even more unread messages today than you had yesterday. You will never catch up. Kill yourself now! Dave Winer, who'd done more than anyone else to popularize RSS, urged users to stop treating RSS feeds like a pile of incoming email -- with each message representing a task you had to deal with -- but rather as a "river of news." Your feeds gave you a flow of interesting stuff; you could dip into the stream at will, and drop out of it as needed. In a video that briefly made the tech-blogosphere rounds in 2007, Robert Scoble cheerily explained how he keeps up with more than six hundred feeds -- and showed exactly how the river-of-news approach works. But few heeded the advice.

I have 118 subscriptions -- and yet as of today, I have a pile of more than 2 thousand items still to read. A year or two ago, that would have driven me nuts, today I do use the river-of-news approach and dip into it as I see fit. It isn't that I read about this approach or anything, it's just an emotional/psychological adjustment that comes to you slowly, if you want to keep using RSS and not go insane. Sort of like life, when you realize that you can only do -- and be -- so many things at the same time.

Oh, Netflix

Today, Netflix gave me this:


Didn't get it? Well, it knows I like scary movies (or at least, browsing scary movies, as opposed to watching them) and recommends me a few. Among them is Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky In Our Times.

The longest point in pro-tennis and the longest match

You'd think the longest match in tennis would be some kind of memorable classic, right? Well, wrong. A not-altogether-unintentionally hilarious NYT piece:

Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 24, 1984, Nelson and Jean Hepner, who were ranked No. 93 and No. 172 in the world, engaged in a 29-minute, 643-shot rally that remains the longest point played in a professional tennis match.

For comparison, during a match last month, Andy Murray and Julien Benneteau had a rally that lasted 53 shots, and it was the longest either of them could remember playing in competition.

The rally between Nelson and Hepner occurred in the first round of the $50,000 Virginia Slims-sponsored Ginny tournament at the Raintree Swim and Racquet Club in Richmond, Va., with Nelson finally prevailing, 6-4, 7-6 (11).

The 6-hour-31-minute marathon was itself the longest match in tennis history for nearly 20 years and remains the longest match completed on a single day.

And then some great lines:

Both Nelson and Hepner seem vaguely embarrassed that their names are in the record books.

Er, yes - I would be too!

The rally that put Nelson-Dunbar and Hepner in the record books came at set point for Hepner, who was ahead, 11-10, in the second-set tie breaker, which lasted 1:47 on its own.

“There was tons of lobbing,” Nelson-Dunbar said. “I would try to come in and she’d lob me again.”

After winning the point, Nelson-Dunbar collapsed with cramps in her legs. The chair umpire, who apparently maintained consciousness throughout the 643-stroke point, actually called a time-violation warning, but Nelson-Dunbar pulled it together and got back to the baseline to begin the next point.

How does a point go on for 29 minutes before one player or the other hits a winner or makes a mistake?

“We were both pretty much standing on the baseline lobbing,” Nelson-Dunbar said.

Hepner recalled, “I was just really concentrating and was very consistent.”

Two points later, Nelson-Dunbar closed out the match and apologized to the lines officials for its length.

“I felt so bad for them,” she said. “They were sitting out there so long, and they must have been falling asleep.”

But imagine this...

Among the astonishing elements to the match was this: If Hepner had won the epic rally, she would have forced a third set, and who knows how long the match might have lasted.

Line of the day

From The Onion:

Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.

Line of the day

David Edelstein on Jane Campion's Bright Star, about the doomed love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne:

Even if you set aside Schneider, Bright Star is remarkably evocative. It is our postmodern, ironic way to picture Romantic poets as lyrical fops lolling under gray English skies, their musings interrupted by bronchial spasms aimed at tastefully blood-spotted handkerchiefs.

Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole

May I just say that this sounds like a terrible idea to me?

Her determination is scary

Andrew Keen is one confused man

Listen to Paul Duguid eviscerate Andrew Keen's arguments in this podcast. I almost fell sorry for him - he seemed so out of his league.

From the annals of incomprehensible academic writing

Via Culture Matters:

Transforming Cultures is pleased to announce that this year the TfC Annual Lecture will be presented by:

Professor Kathleen Stewart (Dept. of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin).

Atmospheric Atunements

Thursday 20th August 2009, 6:00-8:00 pm
University of Technology in Sydney Gallery Function Centre, Level 6, UTS Tower Building.

Abstract:
Something throws itself together. Or sags, shifts tone, or fails. Invisible airs quicken around nascent forms, rinding up like the skin of an orange. Circulating forces waver and pulse, visceralizing the sheer sense of something happening. The ordinary hums with the background noise of all that takes place in moments, scenes, objects, resonances, rhythms. The atmospheric attunes to the sentience of things passing in and out of existence, to the expressivity of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘whatever being’. This sensing out that attends is itself a labor of worlding, an effort to inhabit a flighty ground.

This writing asks what it takes to live out the worlding of forces rinding up and dissipating. But it also wonders about the significance of accretion itself. The way that an atmosphere accretes for senses in sync with it (or sort it) and the worlding that accrues partially or fully, quickly or slowly, for a time, with habit or shock, in practices or daydreams. A worlding – an attunement – that can be sloughed off, realized, imagined, brought to bear or just born.

Yeaaaaahhhhhh. It's writing like this that gives postmodernism a bad name.

Duncan Watts and Harrison White

I've been reading Duncan Watts' Six Degrees and it's a very engaging book but this sentence stopped me stone cold:

Harrison is famous not only for his irascible manner and impenetrable writing but also for his profound generosity, astounding breadth of interest, and occasionally startling insight.

Occasionally startling insight? Only "occasionally"? Is this supposed to be a compliment? A backhanded compliment? An outright insult? Hmmmmm.