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I’ve Been Drawing.

16 Dec
There. That dispenses with the formality of explaining why I’ve been gone so long quite succintly, even if not accurately (I’ve been doing many other things besides, but this post is not about them).

So. Drawing!

I read about this book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain on a blog that I now forget. The blogger insisted she’d gone from drawing stick figures to stuff resembling Actual Art ™ after going through this book. This sounded somewhat promising, but I was still apprehensive since even stick figure drawing has always eluded me. I mean, I can draw a stick dude just standing there, sure, but make him move? Or sit? Or wear a hat? I’d fail a test that required me to copy XKCD strips accurately.

Okay, I can see you guys don’t believe me. This is why I have come prepared.

The first chapter of the book made me do a few “pre-instruction” drawings. One of the assignments was DRAW A PERSON. Any person. And this was my response (that thing that looks like a five year old’s picture of a generic girl, yes, that one… actually, scratch that, my three year old niece actually makes better drawings than this). I began by copying off a magazine ad but gave up very soon because it was just too hard. This detail is important because…

Compare that drawing with this – a copy of Picasso’s line drawing of Stravinsky, I made just a couple of pages later. The drawing isn’t perfect obviously, but it is (to me) almost miraculous in the increased complexity. I got shirt folds! And crossed fingers! And a truly passable resemblance to the drawing I was copying. I didn’t give up in frustration, even though just ten minutes ago I had done exactly that with a similar task.

And the trick with which this miracle was accomplished was so very simple. That brilliant book instructed me to turn Picasso’s drawing upside down, and just copy the lines without thinking about what the lines were supposed to represent.

This is a huge deal. It’s a key that unlocks so many seemingly unpassable barriers to drawing: if you think you want to draw a finger, then your brain forces you to use your personal symbol for “finger”, probably determined when you were 5 or 6 years old, which looks nothing like a real finger. But if you just say you want to draw these bunch of lines right there at the end of your hand, and then you draw them, fingers just … appear.

So NEAT.

Here’s a before and after of my hand. The before is not exactly before. It was done after I drew Stravinsky above, so it’s a little better than my “OMG A Person” before-drawing. The after is also not exactly “after”, since I was only about 90 pages into the book when I did it.

After I drew that hand I just gazed and gazed at it for minutes on end. I still can’t believe that came out of the end of MY pencil.

But that hand is nothing, nothing, compared to what I drew this past Wednesday. I’m about 120 pages into the book, mind, less than halfway through it. But I think this is pretty freaking AWESOME, do you not think so?

I present to you my crowning glory thus far: a partial copy of Rubin’s “Study of Arms and Legs”. Viola!

Look at that girl up there. Then look at these legs. Look at that girl again. And now look at these legs again. The legs are now diamonds.

Oh, man, if I ever get done gazing at these legs in self-congratulation, I might get back to the book and learn a bit more about drawing. Meanwhile, it’s good to be back in the blogosphere! 

Spark

13 Jan

Someday when I’m a big name famous writer with millions in sales and millions more in the bank, people are going to annoy the hell out of me by asking me two hundred times a week the single most FAQ when people talk to writers: where do you get your inspiration? I think the smart thing to do is to prepare for the contingency now by blogging it all out, so when the time comes I can just hand out this link, snap my fingers, and say “Next!”

The answer is short and simple: I get inspired almost exclusively when I see, read or hear awesome stuff.

Does you guys have the same experience? It’s practically impossible for me to take a walk down the street and come back itchng to write. Not even if I lived somewhere ridiculously picturesque, I don’t think, since I hardly ever get Inspired!!! on vacations. Doing stuff doesn’t make me want to write either. It’s rarely that I’m hang-gliding and at the same time dying to get back to my desk to write about it, you know? (Not that I’ve ever actually hang-glid. It’s still on the bucket list.) And while my thoughts do turn to writing when things begin to go to pot around me, I doubt that can be counted as inspiration… it’s more of a coping mechanism.

But put on a brilliant movie (Trikaal, Fargo, Ishqiya) and I’d be hitting pause to SQUEE and WRITE and THEORIZE about it every two seconds if it wasn’t for fear of never getting to finish the movie now when you factor in Angad-related interruptions in addition and also fear of Saurabh throttling me. I read a mindblowing book (Rebecca, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Doll’s House) and it spawns thousands of words of my own original fiction. If anybody ever plays Dil To Bachchha Hai Ji around me I am guaranteed to feel that telltale tickle in my fingers… the song makes words just come pouring out.

A few years ago I read a – it was fanfic, ok? You’d think this would be embarrassing to admit, but it isn’t, because that’s how perfect it was. It’s a Harry Potter 7th year fanfic that was written before the release of Deathly Hallows, The Crux Of The Matter, and oh my god it just grabbed me and refused to let go. Everything I’ve written since is an attempt to live up to it. I want to fall down on my knees and shout GODDAMN whenever I think of it; it’s nothing short of a religious experience. In the months after I read that one fanfiction novel, I wrote furiously and fast and even managed to make a submission. It even got published. For actual money. I still can’t get that fic out of my head. I have it printed out, pages of it sitting at my desk gathering dust mostly, but just looking at it is enough to remind me about why writing is so worthwhile.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not equating inspiration with the fan experience. I will go fannishly wild over all kinds of things all the time, but only some will make me want to write. For instance, my love of P.G. Wodehouse or Pulp Fiction or any number of truly sublime works of art is legendary, but damned if it makes me want to write. Some things I’m happy just admiring, others light the spark in my head that makes me go I want to do something like that! NOW!

I know if I can recreate a tenth of the spark in me, why, that’s my definition of success. That’s inspiration.

What do you think, people? What inspires you?

Book Review: Past Midnight

12 Nov


Got an ARC of Past Midnight by Mara Purnhagen straight from Harlequin YA Paranormal, and I must say I was very pleasantly surprised by its quality and readability.

Charlotte Silver is the oft-overlooked younger sister in a family of ghost hunters. This is less weird than it sounds. Charlotte’s parents do not actually believe in ghosts, they’re more interested in disproving claims of hauntings while being unable to explain away a couple of strange “energy patterns” they’ve come across in their career.

Anyway, Charlotte happens to trigger some actual, somewhat malevolent sleeping ghosties during a filming session with her parents and older sister. The haunting begins in earnest as Charlotte begins to have cryptic dreams about a girl from the past century, and sinister thuds and thumps and thrown furniture begin to hammer in the ghostly message: find the dead girl, and somehow reunite her with her even deader parents.

And meanwhile Charlotte copes with starting her senior year at a new high school where a mysterious tragedy occurred last year, a new friend with big secrets, a fight with her older and much more glamorous sister, the bitchy rival in the AV club and the cute boy also in the AV club… Standard fare for your typical YA novel, very deftly handled.

The book’s weakness lies in its very-vanilla themes and storyline: nothing big is at stake, nobody is evil, no one’s life is risked and very little happens in the climax. YA books these days tend to push the envelope when it comes to dark themes and high stakes – for example, Sarah Rees Brennan’s “The Demon’s Lexicon” is in a completely different league compared to this. Perhaps it’s not always necessary to go dark and dangerous to be a good book, but the low conflict level in this one did detract from my ability to care what happens to Charlotte. I always knew she would be fine.

Then again, the book is what it is. Light reading is just as legitimate as.. er, dark reading?

The book’s strength is definitely in its solid narrative skills and likeable cast of characters. I can see why there will be two more books about Charlotte Silver. Recommended for younger teens.

4/5 stars!

Review of The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin

20 Apr


Loved this book.

For the first time in years it was like reading a book written by an adult who has thoughts worth writing down, not just entertaining stylings by someone who knows how to spin me a good story of little consequence. For example:

There are souls…whose umbilicus has never been cut. They ever got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.

Perhaps it’s dubious praise coming from me, since I neither read nor understand most books labeled True Literature ™, but this sure felt like the real deal. The book felt meaty even though it’s quite short, especially for this genre.

I found myself lingering over the simplicity and clarity of the writing, which was sometimes almost poetry. For example, the opening lines:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb, it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an, idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

and later in the book –

Gvarab was old enough that she often wandered and maundered. Attendance at her lectures was small and uneven. She soon picked out the thin boy with big ears as her one constant auditor. She began to lecture for him. The light, steady, intelligent eyes met hers, steadied her, woke her, she flashed to brilliance, regained the vision lost. She soared, and the other students in the room looked up confused or startled, even scared if they had the wits to be scared. Gvarab saw a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing, and it made them blink. The light-eyed boy watched her steadily. In his face she saw her joy. What she offered, what she had offered for a whole lifetime, what no one had ever shared with her, he shared. He was her brother, across the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption.

For the first time ever I want to ANALYSE a book in a very textbooky fashion after I’ve read it – I’m going off in daydreams pondering questions like (WARNING: MINOR SPOILER) “Why does Shevek reject his mother? Is this significant in terms of the Odonian belief in gender equality?” (END OF MINOR SPOILER) and “Is LeGuin saying an anarchist society can only exist in a desert, not a land of plenty?” When I was at school, they made us ask and answer such questions on whatever we were supposed to read for Lit class, it used to ruin the book for me.

Another first is that even though I obviously loved this book, and found LeGuin very convincing and very impressive, I’m not a convert to Odonism/anarchism. That’s a minor miracle, you know. I’m very convertible. Ask anyone. But LeGuin has a faith in the goodness of human nature that I don’t share – in her anarchist Anarres it takes seven generations for even a semblance of a power structure to form; I don’t think real human beings would “be good” for a seventh as long. Le Guin’s argument is that a strong-enough culture of constant revolution is capable of achieving that. Maybe she’s right, who knows? I was brough up in the opposite sort of culture, the capitalist one, which so frequently reminds me that man’s basic nature is greed/power-seeking that it probably is self-perpetuating. I probably cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to have the other half of human nature – goodwill, sociality, pure love of work/play that is its own reward – reinforced a hundred times a day by the world around me…

There I go on another daydream.

The book does have flaws, of course… Its conception of what sexism is, and how we ought to deal with it, is rather dated. And like I said, I don’t agree with its philosophy, because the author’s view of human nature is too rosy. The book also does not have what is termed immediacy, it’s not a page-turner. This is because the hero does not have any urgent need, nor does the story have any explosive conflict. It’s a well-constructed, interesting and profound but placid book.

I read this book placidly too, in half-hour installments – that’s how long my commute to work is. Since I have to walk a little to/from the bus stop, I also spent about 10 minutes before and after the half hour reading session thinking about what I had read. This really added to my experience of this book. I think it would have been quite different if I had inhaled it whole in three hours on the couch, as is my usual fashion. Hmm… Something to be said there for patience with one’s reading material, but of course it’s very rare to find a book that deserves it as much as this one does.

On a side note, now I’m more interested than ever in reading my old college buddy Madhav Mathur’s book, Diary of an Unreasonable Man. He’s promoting it as an anarchist manifesto… I gotta bump it up my TBR list.

So I’m giving The Dispossessed five stars out of five. Just in case my effervescent effusiveness had not clued you in yet. Read it! It’s good!

PS: A couple of other book reviews are up on my Goodreads profile. Anybody here on Goodreads? Friend me!

30 Apr

So yesterday I saw just about the worst movie ever made – Freaky Chakra – which I refuse to dignify with even a link to the IMDB page. Karma made up for it today as I finished Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson which is freaking brilliant. Word for word it packs probably the highest WTFness than any other book I’ve ever read. Isn’t black comedy awesome?

A word of warning: the less you read about the book before you read the book, the better.

"You": Are You Talking To Me?

3 Jan

(Health update: I’m feeling a lot better! Thanks for your concern!)

In a fit of ________________ (stupidity/boredom/lazy curiosity/revealing moronicity – take your pick), I picked up You: The Owner’s Manual the last time I was at the library. Among my other loans were such ill considered, uninspired books such as Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor and one of Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks. None of these reads were anywhere near entertaining or useful but You was something else.

You’ve heard enough about how entertainment in America is dumbed down, but until you’ve read (if you can call it that) You, held this red devil in your hands with a glaze in your eyes and a muzak-like hum masking the terror in your mind, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Before I had finished reading the first chapter I was already experiencing the warm ooze of brain goo down my neck. By the time chapter five hit five zombies could have feasted on the mess.

Where to begin describing the horror?

For starters, from line 1, page 1, the book reads like a stand-up act gone awry.

If [your neck] is over 17 inches, you have more than a 50% chance of developing sleep apnea or a better than 30% chance of making it as an official NFL linesman.

[Bronchial tubes] are typically like a four year old’s birthday cake – covered with mucus.

Just a few changes may be all you need to keep your sex organs in tip top driving condition. So pull them in for a pit stop. We’ll show you how to change your oil.

It would not be so bad if these jokes were sparse, meant to prop up prose sagging under the weight of the useful medical information it imparts. It would not be so bad if the jokes were even remotely connected to the genre of health and medicine, or were dead baby jokes. But Mehmet Oz’s ghostwriter, charged with the task of holding the average American man’s attention through a personal health book, crams sports jokes, pop culture jokes, fart jokes and knock knock jokes into practically every single sentence. Word for word, this is less a manual of medicine than a “What Not To Do” guidebook for comedians.

And then there are the pictures – of various parts of the human body, see, that illustrate the text. Except there’s this lecherous looking elf clambering all over your internal organs in every diagram. Sometimes there’s two or three of them. And your body parts! They look fine (usually), but their names are unrecognisable. Ever heard of an “Epic Glottis”? Me neither. Apparently it’s somewhere in the viscinity of your “Troublemaker” (which, for once, the text helpfully translates as “tongue”). Other labels are more difficult to fathom. It was after several minutes of incredulous staring that I figured out that “P’Too”, far from being the dastardly elf spitting in that unlikely place, was supposed be be your pituitary gland. I am still trying to figure out what a set of realistically drawn bagpipes, labelled “Bagpipes”, are doing just below the “Epic Glottis”. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

The six year olds at whom this book is targeted will also enjoy the hilarious double-page cartoons that pepper the more cumbersome chapters. In the chapter about your immune system the comic is titled “The Staph Story”, and features mysterious animated alphabets called “B” and “T” which eradicate a colony of bacteria with the help of machine guns. There’s also a cartoon about cancer, a panel in which shows cancer cells running from what I can only assume is a lymph node screaming “Oh, no, it’s the cancer cops!”

One last irksome thing before I silence my keyboard forever on the subject of this ghastly book. All its sins I could have forgiven with a careless remark about how dumb Americans deserve this dumb health book… but for the chapter on sex organs, where it crosses the line into being offensive. All three sections in this chapter primarily address men. It’s penis this, testosterone that, prostate the other. Diagrams (still featuring our friend, the vile and perverted elf) of the male anatomy outnumber those of the female anatomy handily – there’s only one drawing of female parts to three of male parts. Even when the prose talks about women, it addresses men and male concerns – nothing illustrates this better than the fact that even though there is no discussion of pregnancy or lactation here, the discussion of breasts and breast cancer finds its place in this of all chapters. Because of course to the “Joe Six-pack” demographic this books is targeting breasts can be nothing more than sex objects even in a medical book.

In the tradition of Jon Stewart’s “moment of Zen”, I leave you to contemplate this gem of prose composition from the chapter on the digestive system:

The food-consumption process starts right here–in your body’s food processor. Though opera singers, politicians, and courtside fans are known mostly for what comes out of their mouths, what makes our mouths so special is how we handle what goes into them. For starters, consider you mouth to be like the guy who buckles you in on a Ferris wheel–it’s there simply to prepare the food for the journey.

Ender’s Game: quick verdict

10 Dec

Orson Scott Card’s most famous novel is a quick read in the beginning, but the pace slacks off as the novel approaches its climax. It’s a serious defect for a book that’s all about strategy. The short story which you can read online here is much better.

Saying NO to Beedle the Bard

4 Dec

Love and hate are twins underneath, and that is why I didn’t know until about two minutes ago that The Tales of Beedle the Bard was coming out today. I won’t be buying it.

There was a time when I admired J. K. Rowling with so much ferocity I wanted to be her – if not to be a woman of such evident (at the time) creativity and brains, then to at least know what would happen next in the Harry Potter saga. But the last two books sucked, so that was that. On top of that, Rowling kept chattering brainlessly about the books long after they were finished, adding details and shutting down theories and generally stirring up drama for the sake of drama.

For example.

Ron becomes an Auror. No, Ron becomes a shopkeeper! No, wait, of *course* he becomes an Auror right alongside Harry.

Neville Longbottom marries Hannah Abbott. Draco Malfoy marries Astoria Greengrass. Luna Lovegood marries Rolf Scamander. Percy Weasley marries Audrey Somebody and has kids called Molly and Lucy. George Weasley marries Angelina Johnson (the girl his twin brother dated the whole time, how messed up is she and ewwwww isn’t that incest or something?) and has kids called Fred and Roxanne. LOLOLOLOL CANNOT GET ENOUGH OF WHO MARRIES WHOM AND HAS WHAT KIDS! (Lest you think I actually had all this info in my head, source: Wikipedia.)

Dumbledore was a flaming homosexual. Take that, critics who call JKR hopelessly devoted to heteronormativity!

And most recently, JKR revealed that Harry and Hermione could have gotten together, because they shared some “charged moments” together, especially when Ron deserted the trio during DH. I am not making this up. Pardon me, but I need to use a term here for the very first time in my life:

OMGWTFBBQ?!

The flipside of love is hate; I have nothing but contempt for anything Harry Potter these days. So the best this new release, which before would have had me salivating *months* in advance, can only elicit a… meh. (It’s a real word now, yes!)

TFSMIF

21 Nov

This week was marked by some highs and but more pitiful lows.

The NaNoWriMo effort is plodding on at the rate of approximately 500 words per decade, with the exception of an exciting last Monday when I sat on Mr. Awakey Pants’s playmat and watched him and wrote at the same time. (He has learned to creep as well as sit up, needing constant attention.) Sadly, by the time Tuesday rolled around, he had figured out that Mommy’s laptop has WIRES coming out of it. Mr. Awakey Pants has an oral fixation with wires. We figure it’s a good thing: it won’t be long before he accidentally electrocutes himself, thus gaining superpowers.

NANDINI’S CREATIVITY GNOMES: Drat! Foiled again!

Drastic measures have been planned for this weekend.

Bite was probably the worst book I’ve ever read, including Mary Higgins Clark. Well… maybe not, because some have made me angrier (City of Joy, for one). Certainly the most incompetently written, though. The first story in it is about a vampire hunter who sleeps with a vampire. Except that happens in the last five pages of the story with no foreshadowing for it, and the missing girl the vampire hunter is supposed to be finding in the beginning and middle of the story is completely forgotten in order to get these two into bed (really). It turns out this story is a “missing moment” from the author’s series of books about the vampire hunter and the vampire, so it is nothing more than a clunky self-promo. The third story (I skipped the second) is about a world in which female witches need to sleep with and get bitten by vampires once a week in order to avoid death by overproduction of blood. Really. At this point I stopped reading. If you’re wondering what I was doing with a book that advertises itself as containing “stories of dark seduction”: it was research, ok? Every November I think I should write a Harlequin novel for NaNo. Every year I cancel and write something else (except 2006). This year was no different.

Watched two movies: You Only Live Twice and Two Weeks Notice. The former is one of the more bullshit Bond movies, which I might as well tell you I completely lack the necessary faculties to appreciate (empty cranial cavity?). A Bond movie is barely watchable when it has some good sight gags – like that guy with metal teeth or people being murdered by gold-plating – but this movie traded iconic visuals for a slightly more irritating Bond. Bah. Two Weeks Notice was surprisingly good, among the best romantic comedies I’ve seen. Recommended.

Gtg, Mr. Awakey Pants needs to be put to bed and both hands are needed.

Thank FSM it’s Friday, eh?

Back With A Meme

5 Sep

Hola, internets! I’ve missed you. *muah*

You know where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, viz, home and entertaining/feeding/cleaning my little guy practically 24/7. I say practically, because even though I’ve had lots of help (mom and mil and of course, the new daddy), the kid demands to be fed for half an hour every two hours, and believe me that gets annoying.

But he’s really an angel otherwise. :)

On with the blog! What have we for you today? Why, it’s an Unusual Books meme.

List 10 books you have on your bookshelf that you think nobody else on your friends list has on theirs.

I’m tagging everyone who’s still reading this blog. Get to it!

1. My Little Book of Poems, by Kathy Mailer (An old, old pocket-sized book of nursery rhymes, most I’ve never heard of.)

2. FM 21-76: The U.S. Army Survival Manual (Got it at a used book sale for $0.25. Have yet to crack its covers.)

3. The Elementary Particle, by Michael Houellebecq (Weird novel I found barely readable but Saurabh liked.)

4. Tripping to Somewhere, by Kris Reisz (Straight from the author, autographed and all.)

5. The Compromise, by Sergei Dovlatov (Was part of an anniversary present for Saurabh – a book of short stories by a famous Russian writer. Verdict: Eugh.)

6. The Patty Perfect Guide (An etiquette book for the “working girl” published in the 1920s. Hilarious in its unabashed sexism: “The busy executive has no time to notice your manicure or your new hairdo. The Patty Perfect secretary is always professional, and isn’t disappointed when he doesn’t.”)

7. 21 Great Stories, edited by Abraham H. Lass and Norma L. Tasman (I had to throw this in here. It’s possibly the best collection of short stories I’ve ever read, and I read those a lot. Many of the stories in this book make my top 10 list of favourite works.)

8. An Illustrated History of the Third Reich, by John Bradley (Switzerland 2003 – my host in St Gallen gave me this book.)

9. Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov (Another book of great short stories, and as close to literature, officially speaking, as I’ve ever really been able to appreciate.)

10. Haunted Encounters: Stories of Departed Pets, edited by Bidouna (The one book I’d be willing to actually bet money that nobody else I know owns. My first published story appeared in this book.)

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