Since the day I decided to write, now is the longest period when I think the least about writing. Today I neither dream of becoming a full-time writer, nor write as much as I used to. Friends are always considerate to not point out that I may have gotten over her it. They ask. What are you writing these days? Why aren’t you writing much these days? Well, if that is what you want. If that makes you happy.

I started blogging nearly seven years ago. Back then and for a long time after, all writing was a form of unwinding. My catharsis was the reader’s ennui. For a while I wrote regularly and walked coolly in a sense of underachievement, certainty of knowledge (or ignorance), precocious wisdom and occasional anger, like a misunderstood rock star. I got interested in fiction because I thought I could — or wanted to — write as well as the writers I read. I thought I knew the whats, hows, whys. I was taking courses. Certainty was another keyword. A little later I stumbled upon professional tech-blogging (neither professional nor tech), writing regularly and earning on the side. It started with a sense of discipline, ended with a sense of monotony, and occasionally haunts me with a guilt of content farming. Somewhere in between, I wrote to my mentor that if I quit the day job (which I actually enjoyed) I will have more reasons (like starvation, I suppose) to force myself to write, and I discussed options and other trivial things with close family and friends. I am glad I wasn’t ready to star in love stories with great class differences and glorious endings.

I didn’t ask until much later: to be a writer or to write? I can’t always tell when I am lying to myself. Still I thought I’ll just write. Mail, blog, review, criticize, critique. I continued being verbose in mails and their replies, blogged this and that less and less, and passionately wrote scathing reviews when I didn’t like what I read or watched.

I got picky with the books I read and the movies I watch. I got lucky and stumbled upon blogs by activists, artists, critics, economists, linguists, mathematicians, mavericks, moms, poets, satirists, sociologists, sysadmins, teachers, and writers. They all collectively mellowed me down and filled my mind with questions, uncertainty and ambiquity. Whereas earlier the question was the choice of point of view, fiction being the only way and first person being the pen’s pet, now the questions multiplied and zoomed out. Short fiction or long? Fiction or nonfiction? Writing or other art forms? Why and how?

No longer is it a mission to publish, I told myself. If you want to write, write. Write without the fear of coherence or completion, rhyme or rules, sense or sensitivity. Let the mind look under the bed and above the attic and that damp dark smelly corner that you were afraid to probe because you didn’t want to get caught. I guarantee you a place where the mind is without fear, if you promise to not ask what happens to what you write.

I sold it. I bought it. That is not to say I wrote much after that, or at all. May be a paragraph here, a broken sentence there, and one or two other things whose future I don’t know. When I knew that what I write might not necessarily be publicly posted, my reasons to write changed. A desire to say something now has a higher mortality rate, a craving more often remains private. There is a difference between expressing an opinion (me too) and that opinion meriting publishing and publicity. The biggest contribution has been an embargo on empty and snarky reviews.

Sometime ago, on BBC or was it NPR, I listened to a wonderful panel discussion on the role and the art of criticism. It singularly influenced on what I think of this subject, and to an extent all writing. As incredibly fun and surprisingly satisfying bashing something for what I think is wrong can be, while also smudging the something with someone and the wrong with stupid, I am getting picky there as well. On the occasional instances when I let myself to freely unleash such wrath, the mission as I said is not to publish. They may be left as drafts or private posts. I don’t question that decision.

Last week I deleted a story for the first time. A friend asked why anybody would do such a thing instead of, say, striking it, zipping it, anonymizing it, and leaving it in a hidden folder. He has a point. The reason why I don’t go back to some of my old posts and delete them or at least mutilate them is because they are a reminder of my thoughts and beliefs, however militantly opposed I may be to those today. But this time I judged the story as uninteresting as well as worthless, and the act of cruelty felt liberating, though not on the scale that Mother India may have felt when she killed Bad Birju. My stand on posthumous works remains unaltered.

P.S. My first short story was published six years ago.

When I read this week that Sidney Lumet died, I was saddened because it never occurred to me that he would have to stop making movies on one dull day.

The first Lumet’s movie that I watched was 12 Angry Men (1957). Instant fanhood. I watched it several times. The least I enjoyed it was when it was screened in the IC&SR auditorium after which people discussed it, then the moderator asked the audience to write down on a piece of paper the one thing they took away from the movie, then the audience wrote, then the pieces of paper were all collected, and then the audience left. Nothing ruins a movie like a crowd discussing it and a ring master asking the crowd to write the one thing they took away from it. It might be amusing to read how various people might have prioritized their thoughts and managed to throw away everything else while clinging on to the one thought that would make them look most unique and wise.

Then I watched the prophetic Network (1976). If you know of a better movie made about the television media, I want to know about it. Today Glenn Beck does a poor imitation of Howard Beale. I am yet to see a more cosmic and ferocious monologue than Ned Beatty’s, the chubby face of God. I am glad to see the movie enter the IMDB Top 250, and now rise up to the Top 200, glad that it has reached far more people than it did around the time I had first watched it. (1976-77 was a great and infamous year when All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, Network, and Taxi Driver lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Rocky.)

Then I watched Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Agatha Christie’s favorite film adaptation among her novels. It was possibly the most visually striking movie Lumet made (but how would I know! I watched 9 of over 70.), and it didn’t make a big impression on me visually, either because the print I had watched wasn’t good enough or because he just couldn’t make a movie where anything other than the story can be overt. But the movie was nostalgic and exotic about a time and a place that I know nothing about. It gave me a good idea of Poirot. Most of all it had a remarkable performance by Ingrid Bergman almost entirely during a single five-minutes-long no-cuts scene, the more interesting part of which is that Lumet kept the camera on her face throughout, as if directing our and the Academy’s attention.

Around this time I chanced upon the filmography of Sidney Lumet and found one of the most prolific and diverse repertoires. I took Roger Ebert’s advice when he wrote, “If you care to read only one book about the steps in the making of a film, make it Making Movies.” I hardly learnt anything from the book, but it gave me an appreciation of the infinite things that go into making movies, and taught me that I knew nada. The book introduced me to a warm non-auteur hard-working director who worked on making movies as if it was his daily job. He was serious about making movies, about making the best possible ones given various limitations, while being considerate with the producers and the cast and the crew. (Unlike the legends of cruelty about Kubrick and Hitchcock’s styles of filmmaking, Lumet sides with the softness in Eastwood’s approach.)

Sidney Lumet was often considered as lacking a visual style, and he likely took it as a compliment. He didn’t consider technical details unimportant, but seemed meticulous, even obsessed, about they being not just supportive but also invisible in letting the story to be conveyed in such a way that the audience isn’t drawn to any particular aspect of the filmmaking itself. It was clear when I watched the story of redemption, The Verdict (1982). The movie has the least dramatic courtroom closing I know of, even when compared to the famous scene in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962), which according to me is passionate though not dramatic. In the director’s commentary of The Verdict‘s DVD, Lumet spoke about David Mamet’s writing, Paul Newman’s acting, the numerous casting and lighting and coloring choices made, and many other things. I found his commentary, like his movies and book, thoughtful and informative about the themes of the works as well as the nitty-gritties of filmmaking.

Then I watched the rowdy Dog Day Afternoon (1975). I had watched it in several parts over several sittings before a recent full-length viewing. People quote, “Attica! Attica! Attica!”, which is unknown to me. Wyoming, anyone? Given the increasing debate about alternate sexuality in Indian society, I welcome its re-release or screening in a film festival. Apart from its rich themes and characters, its plot and narration are gripping enough for most people who watch movies. For some reason I didn’t love the much-acclaimed Serpico (1973). May be it was the hairdo, or the dog, or the heroine, or simply that Serpico wasn’t an easy character to connect with. Nevertheless, watching this and the previous movie were, to me, a new revelation of Al Pacino’s acting prowess.

Then I watched The Deadly Affair (1966), the movie I least liked among all Lumet’s movies, despite the famous novel and the stellar cast. May be the secret agent stuff has lost its charm on me. Had there been a DVD commentary, things might have been different.

Then I watched the nail-biting Fail-Safe (1964). It was remade recently and to me it seems very suitable for theatre production. It is a well-balanced debate on war and the tragic conscious choices of destruction that accompany it. It was understandably overshadowed by its counterpart. The satire of the movie was provided by the forced disclaimer about how the military makes truly fail-safe mechanisms that absolutely preclude the events of the story from ever happening. Hypocrisy, stupidity, or does it matter?

Then I watched The Anderson Tapes (1971). It gives an idea of what Lumet may have made of a script like Ocean’s Eleven‘s. While it is about a grand burglary by a hand-picked gang, it’s neither cool, nor smooth. Apart from what is considered as one of the earliest takes on the absurd intrusion of electronic surveillance, it also came across as the full-length first draft of Dog Day Afternoon.

All his movies that I watched are social commentaries on the ambiguity of guilt, the absurdity of consumerism and TV ratings, the validity of victims sentencing the perpetrator, the settlement of court cases on external reasons, the celebrity of crime, the sanctimony of watchdogs, the blurring of friends of enemies and enemies of friends, the logic of war, the notorious choice between security and privacy. His leitmotif was conscience, as the NY Times obituary suggests. His movies are filled with characters with personal moralities. Speaking of which, characters in Lumet’s movies often are themselves the vehicles carrying elements of surprise, either by peeling their layers one at a time throughout the narration (never a back story) or by having them act in a way that surprises themselves. When I think back at many of these movies, I notice that he was prone to downplaying even the most outrageous and dramatic elements in them, while accompanying them with a wryness.

7th July, 2011: I’m not sure why I felt compelled to not post this back then.

2010 was a good year of books for me – a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, novels and short stories and memoirs, by writers old and young, acclaimed and establishing.

I am a little unhappy to have only read 22 books, even without comparing with the wastrelette Weinman, but I am ecstatic about the choices given that most writers I picked up this year were new to me and many of them have become favorites. Some books changed my life and several left a lasting impression. There are only four books that I regret reading.

One of my cliques strongly resolved this year to read more books than buy, excluding gifts and references. I succeeded until mid-December and I blame the clique for the binge that followed. May be next year then, eh? I know better than to discuss future plans.

James Ellroy: I started 2010 with Ellroy’s first novel Brown’s Requiem and followed it with his first memoir My Dark Places. I haven’t read anything else he wrote. I can tell his first novel was far from his best. The memoir made me his fan and I am drawn to the grit with which Ellroy faces darkness. I occasionally imitate his writing style. Very poorly. To disastrous effects. I have his thick LA Trilogy right beside me to kick off 2011. It will allow me to assess Ellroy the writer more than Ellroy the man.

Mark Twain: When I discovered audio books, I began my account with the new book of previously unpublished essays Who is Mark Twain? I listened to it twice. Later I listened to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twice each. In school we had some abridged non-detail. Then I couldn’t appreciate Huck and now I realize it is difficult for most Indian students. Not just for the lack of context about the Southern antebellum society, but also for all the colors of people that Annie Coleman brought alive and narrated about. After reading Mark Twain as an adult, I finally see his importance in American English literature. In this age of political correctitude I hope students have the privilege to continue reading unbowdlerized Mark Twain.

Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange deserves its own post, my appy polly loggies. Your humble narrator has been postponing it until he viddies Stanley Kubrick’s cal. I wish to govoreet about why I liked it so much more than George Orwell’s 1984.

John Updike: When writing about Allen Coulter’s Remember Me I felt the desperate need to read John Updike’s Terrorist, for neither had I read any Sep 11 literature nor any book by him. Updike’s lyrical prose is a pleasure to read and it underlines my belief that poets can excel in writing prose. The book can be categorized into what people today call “essentially American”.

Philip Roth: After Everyman in December 2009 I read Exit Ghost in December 2010. I have been raving about his writing with anyone who listens. His portrayal of old age is unlike any other I’ve read, ugly and gritty, banal and bleak, pathetic and unsentimental. I hope that it becomes my tradition to read Philip Roth every December. Because in my mind I think of Updike whenever I think of Roth, I hope that it becomes my tradition to also read John Updike every year.

Henry David Thoreau: I don’t hold the writer Thoreau as highly as many others do. But I owe my weltanschauung to the man more than any other single person. Walden drew me more towards a minimalist, secluded lifestyle and intensified my need to read literature. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience improved my understanding of a society and a government and opened me to the possibility of a need for better and newer forms of governments. Thank you, LibriVox.

George MacDonald Fraser: Quartered Safe Out Here is the first book that I bought simply because I had been looking to buy for myself a gift and some blog (not on literature) that I follow recommended it. It is also the first soldier’s memoir that I read. Fraser is old-fashioned, candid, unapologetic and refreshingly indifferent to political correctness. The Cumbrian dialect is a treat. When categorized with Twain’s and Burgess’ books, I discovered that I thoroughly enjoy books written in diverse dialects of English.

James Joyce: A few years ago I happened upon some letters that James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle. Those are the most erotic prose I have ever read (limited experience reading erotica). If his informal letters carried such intensity, I could only speculate about his literature. I finally listened to Dubliners. Some stories deeply moved me and I listened to them again and again. His writing seemed subtle, meticulous, a little elusive, and very different from his correspondence. I got a taste of Joyce’s style and I wish to learn more with Ulysses, which I have been inexplicably postponing indefinitely.

Thomas Harris: Among all the popular thriller writers I’ve read, Thomas Harris is the most well-versed with the craft of novel writing. His characters, even the most perverse ones, are deep and mysterious while made of flesh and bone. His environments have more sensory details than most others. His dialogue rarely sticks out as artificial to my mind. Black Sunday didn’t disappoint either. I think the writer learnt how to create Hannibal Lecter while writing about Michael Lander here. In Black Sunday he went the regular way of sharing the backstory in the making of an ominously intriguing psychopath, whereas later he prudently chose to maintain greater secrecy about Hannibal Lecter in the Cannibal trilogy. That is what put off fans including yours truly when Hannibal Rising came out, and not for any other reason I can recall. I look forward to newer writings by Thomas Harris. He is far too good a writer to be stuck with Hannibal.

Agatha Christie: I have read more books by Agatha Christie than by any other writer. 20. I remember almost nothing from any of those books, so I am forced to ask myself why I read her books. Written in a plain journalistic style with no agenda other than the quest for truth, they are fun, quick and easy to read and mysteriously don’t haunt me with guilt. I started to notice more and more references to occasional wilder usages like private dick, pussy cats, gay parties and man-servants, and that adds to the fun. That still doesn’t answer my question. But I know I will keep reading her books.

Anjum Hasan: I am not a big reader of Indian writing for numerous reasons. But my clique keeps me informed about the new Indian voices (especially female), after filtering out the diasporic writers anguishing in identity crisis and the young blood that write funny or furious stuff. One of their recommendations, Anjum Hasan, acquainted me with the north-east better than the few chinkis I am close to. After reading Lunatic in My Head and Neti, Neti I now yearn to visit Shillong someday. I couldn’t follow the lunacy in the former novel all the way, but the latter was a thoroughly amusing portrait with sub-titles of modern urban India. I will keep my eyes on the Hasan sisters. And Zac.

Stieg Larsson: I finished the Millennium trilogy in 2010, having waited for a low-price edition. I wrote enough about it in the book review.

John Grisham: The more classics and literature I read the more pulp writers I reject. Grisham survives the massacre, but I regret reading his YA novel Theodore Boone. It bored me to death and I wasn’t even expecting another Client.

PG Wodehouse: When I read a paragraph from a Jeeves novel five years ago, I pointed it out as great writing and noted down that paragraph in a scrap book. Wodehouse changed Hugh Laurie’s life. This year he bored a few hours of mine. I am glad to have read something he wrote and to have escaped buying any of his books.

Irving Wallace: An old Telugu movie called antima tIrpu was memorable with an amoral protagonist misusing the power of media. I was told that it is based on Irving Wallace’ The Almighty. I bought the book a couple of years ago and finally read it a couple of months ago. With an old-fashioned hero and heroine, a mediocre villain, sloppy and inconsistent writing, and terrible dialogue that explained too much too often, Irving Wallace disappointed me once again. The Prize may have been the only good book of his that I read (I liked it all those years ago).

Kalpana Swaminathan: The Page 3 Murders is the book I most regret reading this year. Having read an interview years ago, I picked up her book from the Odyssey in Delhi Airport with very unrealistic expectations. Neither is Miss Swaminathan comparable to Agatha Christie nor Lalli to Miss Marple, and I could’ve lived without ever finding that out.

To the Editor:

There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think. That time is coming to an end. During the decades of the Cold War, in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, it was the serious writers who were expelled from literature; now, in America, it is literature that has been expelled as a serious influence on how life is perceived. The predominant uses to which literature is now put in the culture pages of the enlightened newspapers and in university English departments are so destructively at odds with the aims of imaginative writing, as well as the rewards that literature affords an open-minded reader, that it would be better if literature were no longer put to any public use.

Your paper’s cultural journalism – the more of it there is, the worse it gets. As soon as one enters into the ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism of cultural journalism, the essence of the artifact is lost. Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in “the arts”, and everything it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet? Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the literary imagination, cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical issues: “Does the writer have the right to blah-blah-blah?” It is hypersensitive to the invasion of privacy perpetrated by literature over the millennia, while maniacally dedicated to exposing in print, unfictionalized, whose privacy has been invaded and how. One is struck by the regard cultural journalists have for the barriers of privacy when it comes to the novel.

Hemingway’s early stories are set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so your journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they’re easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than fiction. The integrity of the journalist’s informant is never questioned – only the integrity of the writer. The writer works alone for years on end, stakes his or her everything on the writing, pores over every sentence sixty-two times, and yet is without any sort of overriding literary consciousness, understanding, or goal. Everything the writer builds, meticulously, phrase by phrase and detail by detail is a ruse and a lie. The writer is without any literary motive. Any interest in depicting reality is nil. The writer’s guiding motives are always personal and generally low.

And this knowledge comes as a comfort, for it turns out not only are these writers not superior to the rest of us, as they pretend to be – they are worse than the rest of us. Those terrible geniuses!

The way in which serious fiction escapes paraphrase and description – hence requiring thought – is a nuisance to your cultural journalist. Only its imagined sources are to be taken seriously, only that fiction, the lazy journalist’s fiction. The original nature of the imagination in those early Hemingway stories (an imagination that in a handful of pages transformed the short story and American prose) is comprehensible to your cultural journalist, whose own writing turns our honest English words into nonsense. If you told a journalist, “Look inward at the story only,” he wouldn’t have a thing to say. Imagination? There is no imagination. Literature? There is no literature. All the exquisite parts – even the not so exquisite parts – disappear, and there are only those people whose feelings are hurt because of what Hemingway did to them. Did Hemingway have the right …? Does any author have the right …? Sensationalist cultural journalism masquerading as a responsible newspaper’s devotion to “the arts”.

If I had something like Stalin’s power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I’d forbid all public discussions of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals. I’d forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college, and university in the country. I’d outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare to speak one another. I’d leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own. I’d do this for as many centuries as are required to detoxify the society of your poisonous nonsense.

– Amy Bellette/E. I. Lonoff

The above letter has been stripped out of context from Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost without permission.

The last book of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is not unpredictable. From the outset it is clear that the book will be about the final trial, which we know that Salander and her “Knights of the Idiotic Table” will win, despite the several new difficulties and dangers that the supporting cast face and survive from time to time. We do not even learn anything new about superhero Lisbeth Salander. But I never felt the need to complain, except whenever I had to put the book down for reasons beyond my control.

The entire trilogy is very old-fashioned, with its well fleshed out but stereotypical characters and the plainness of its themes. The reason it captivated me is because of the pain-staking research and thorough factual approach that Larsson takes. I haven’t read any of his journalistic reports in the Expo magazine, but I suspect that he was an investigative journalist very much like Mikael “Kalle” Blomkvist, in dogged pursuit of facts for the establishment of what he had reason to believe to be truth.

“Who will clean up Bhopal mess?” “Dow not liable for Bhopal?” “Could it have been averted?” “Two arrest warrants, last ignored by CBI?” “Is Digvijaya Singh targeting his own party?” “Did Arjun Singh arrange Anderson’s exit?” These are a few separate headlines and news stories about the Bhopal gas tragedy from the past few days. Recently I’ve noticed that many Indian news channels have graduated from conducting SMS polls (like “Are reporters morons?”) to posting questions as headlines (mostly rhetorical, I hope). I have been of the opinion that facts about unknowns cannot be established from opinions of a million sheep, but I confess that I am not up to date with the latest research in the applications of stochastic models on social journalism involving sheep. I may have missed the forward about the evolutionary manner of establishing facts, which probably proves that if a Twitter follower is moved enough to reply or a serious citizen to call a news desk then he or she must be knowing and telling the truth with an accurately calculable probability.

Unlike them the reporters and other investigators throughout the Millennium trilogy weren’t taught in the new methods of journalism. They start with their beliefs and gut feelings, with what they feel must be the truth, but they don’t thrum the world with persuasive reports about their perceptions of truth being true based on a long list of opinions, on historic observations, on psychological studies, nor on the ever-so-dependable instincts and intuitions. They ask questions and sieve through provable facts. In an explicit lesson Erika Berger tells a young promising journalist, “Think like a reporter. Investigate who’s spreading the story, why it’s being spread, and ask yourself whose interests it might serve.” In another lesson she rules that under her reign news reports have to deal with provable facts and that editorials (not by every person with an asshole) are the only place for opinions. Blomkvist shows them in his actions. Even though the trilogy is a work of fiction I hold it as a text-book example of old school investigation, and Millennium as a magazine of very high standards unswervingly clinging to the elements of journalism.

Another rarity is the vast number of women characters throughout the trilogy. In this last installment Larsson couldn’t have been more explicit with the numerous annotations about (sometimes mythical) women warriors like Dahomey Amazons, Libyan Amazons, Shammuramat, Semiramis, and Boudica. Were it not for those footnotes I probably would have not paid enough attention to the women in the book: Lisbeth Salander, Erika Berger, Advokat Annika Giannini, Inspector Monica Figuerola, Inspector Sonja Modig, Susanne Linder, Malin Eriksson, Ragnhild Gustavsson, and even the award-winning reporter at She of TV4. (Harriet Vanger and Mirriam Wu were strong too, but they are barely mentioned in this book.)

All these characters have a role to play, all of them are what Larsson likes to call “resourceful” in some way, all of them hold on their own and dominate male characters at sometime. Equally noteworthy is the fact that there are no women on the wrong side, no women who finally lose, no women who show cruelty towards other women (or men without justification). In one clear breach of the fourth wall Larsson through Blomkvist says, “When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who enable it.” He is very clear here that it is not about violence and injustice in general, but about that perpetrated by men against women. It is as if he is apologizing on men’s behalf, making sure that they all win. Yet in another dialogue he (again through Blomkvist) mentions that he does not believe in collective guilt, as if conscious about what appears to be so.

Despite many apparent shortcomings — stereotypes, unsubtleness, even clichédness if you will — Larsson with his matter-of-fact reporting style, by mixing fiction with non-fiction (real places, real scandals, real characters), and most importantly with his idealism makes the trilogy fascinating and memorable.

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