'Madcap Laughs' is great. Each one of the tracks a creation. Does anyone get the hang of the 'poor fool' trip of obits on Syd Barrett? Poor guy - he didnt know his limits; most people know their limits; 'mr. barrett, famously, went on too many and never came back'. So tell, what is the rule of limits? Something like: once you're famous, you have to play the game forever, or atleast want the money to maintain the myth. Is it pathetic to turn recluse? Or to sing twisted but live straight?
There are no bylines for writes in the Economist so listen to what it has to say of 'The Madcap Laughs': 'caught everything: the nervous coughs, the desperate riffling of pages, the cries of frustration'("Again? I'll do it again now?"), the number of takes. The touches could have been deliberately permitted to effect. They work well; even if we know all about editing.
You'd think it was a watershed turn in spin performance when he refused to play the lipsynch game at the vital broadcast of their act to the US public they were never able to cut much with. It's possible he also just didnt care. A lot of people don't. Noam Chomsky replied to a q on what the US government might think of his Hezbollah visit: 'I don't know and I don't care'.
No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language. -Jacques Derrida
I admire Arundhati Roy for a lot of things especially her activism, a word she dislikes. She's smart enough to know what her strengths are and her best work (essays) are built on factual research speaking for itself. However a couple of her speeches (they later get published) have had a couple of debatable moments. One of the few flaws in her public rheotric is that she often slips up badly on dialectics. But with her thing on call centers i think she's sucking on only one heckled breast, totally sidetracking the other. Because whatever she has to say about the birdbrained call center coolies, applies in every way to the hallowed techies whom she has oddly overlooked. Her giant grouses here are the workers' 'false' accent, their job of 'answering telephone queries', the location of customers (offshore-western) services, pandering to customers (by learning facts about their country), name falsification, then bizarrely that the workers are 'paid one-tenth of the salaries of their counterparts abroad', and maybe even that the joke is 'billed to become a multibillion-dollar industry'. The comeback: Java is not an Indian language, but the legions of techies script in it for its preached versatility or whatever. Forget about the accent, it's a different language. Then there are statements in query languages that query (query databases); 'query' employed here as a metaphor for the relative abstraction of most operations in this industry (because even call center workers handle applications that query databases). Then techies too largely work offshore ('absent' from the actual site like the call centerers) and in a minority of cases onsite (they prefer it). Neither do they run down their customers. Names of coders barely come into the picture if they're not on site (they ususally resort to branding the code theyve writting through comments they plainly embed within the official bunch). Is faceless better than name falsification? And does anyone think techies get paid 10 times 'the salaries of their counterparts abroad'? Guess how much the IT (IT=ITES-ES) industry alone is worth? But we could look at it this way, As deconstruction points, the binary opposites Roy has seemed to identify here are: writing and speech. Writing (coding) for her being the priveleged and dignified term, and speech (answering of telephone queries) the repressed, marginalized term. Now guess what? This binary opposition already subverts its owned presumed heirarchy in a strange way. But if it's up to me to decenter this hierachy, here i go first: why not? they're both as bad and maybe the coding worse for its lack of immediate decipherability and absence of communication ie. the machinations of the product (code) itself are inscrutable (myth?) to the client, it is enough that the product works; while in the case of the call center, workers handling a client's queries over the phone, there is communication, from the latin 'to establish a commonesss' and minimum inscrutability. Please - now this decentering itself can be decentred. go ahead. The strange thing I was referring to was that, with 'Of Grammatology' Derrida aimed to deconstruct this one fundamental aspect in the Western tradition of thought - from Plato to Rousseau to Saussure and Strauss - that priveleges the spoken word over writing (logocentrism). And Roy's going just the other way suggesting the reverse hierarchy, which means that's already handled. Writing and Speech are just a free play of differences? Both are (n)either one (n)or the other and pendulating through meanings. But maybe under erasure, they are true equals.
Roy probbaly isn't aware of how her marking out one tribe of workers (poor cousins of the techies) for this treatment shows up her rare flaw for making facile deductions. Then she keeps repeating it at interviews here and there, though i hear she's already beginning to correct herself 'you know'.
Last week after lunch at ce's place in sdhshvngr, the menacing mouse that she had spoken of, turned up right in between us, stared at us, jumped vertically in the air 6cm and then ran back into her store room. ce handed me a broom, took one herself and fencing all exits, asked me to hit mouse once she'd chased it out. I took the broom but said i wouldnt hit the daft thing. This was shit surprising to hear myself say, It seemed like just yesterday when anns and i were hatching plots to wring squirrells to death in delhi. People change. and a heart takes you places.
Alexander of the Blogger team responded and restored the deleted blogs to new urls! If he were in town, it would be beer for life every weekend. Meanwhile, i'm keeping those urls as archive. This shambollic space is the new place. Ubermensch - i can arrange for rum for the help on posts.
Shaking lizards. I have to recall the subject of a few articles worth recovering from the old blog. This is what I can remember: Oriana Fallaci and the dysphemism treadmill Frida Kahlo Books in Roerich's house The Chickmagalur trip (in progress; scratch if u remember any; one week)
There came the time and I registered a new blog by the name SHAMBOLLIC. It took the same question from 3 seriously enigmatic and nice bumblebuds (Viji, Uber, and Murugan) to try on a new one. Having deleted my old blog in a fit, i lost the url to a spam blog as soon. Recovered some from cache but hoping blogger supports is going to help recover the whole some day. I've been spending the little online time being more grateful and fascinated than ever for seminal blog work on stellar babies like the bldgblog and a whole list that will find a mention here on the great links list that should turn up on the side of an embellished blog. The Mtrl pages which whould be oneofakind is sadly still not up but noone should give up hope. This post is to celebrate a nice thing thats happened. I think i'll have done enough with this blog by promoting some thrilling brilliant work out there. Btw, theyve come out with a film vers of Tristram Shandy, it's called 'A Cock and Bull Story' and reads positive. Pasolini and Derrida are turning out to be something. And looking forward to Sunday's rplay 'The Internet wants a chat'.
