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The death of data
efskehfsfrhlrfkdrslfhrgrgwfwfsfrehfIDROPPEDMYHARDDRIVE! From a height of six feet. Now it makes a high-pitched noise every time I plug it in, and refuses to be read. I know this isn’t a big issue, one that’s easily fixed, but temporary lack of data access is unsettling for me. More so that such a situation has been precipitated by (accidental) physical violence, not a software-related one, and the lack of access suddenly casts my digital data as a fragile entity. There is something eerily comedic about how data ‘created’ with one of the stronger of the four natural fundamental forces can be ‘destroyed’ by the weakest.
Damn you, mass. And momentum.
Life, distilled.
Book review: A Ball of Fire, John Montague (Bloomsbury, Rs. 299)
When Gwendolyn Brooks remarked that poetry was “life distilled”, she may have overlooked John Montague and his collection of short stories, A Ball of Fire, which, true to its name, comes alive in “a smothered explosion of color”. Using tight poetic prose that is still conversational and a rhetorical diction evocative of Yeats, Montague does not need the sustained tension of a full novel to make you mourn an actor when he dies; five pages will suffice.
Born in Depression-era Brooklyn to a father he can’t recall, separated from his siblings four years later and sent to an Irish farmhouse to live with his aunts, losing his mother young but knowing a string of lovely ladies through his college and teaching days in the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately marrying thrice, all the time grappling with the meaning of rebellion, sex and identity, Montague’s experiences show in his writing.
In many stories, there is a boy, a young man, a traveler or an unhappy old man constantly placed in a situation he hasn’t been in before, still doused in desires he left the cradle with. There is always a quest, too — to know what love can be devoid of sex, what history can be bereft of adventure, what death can be in the absence of life … most exemplified in the collection’s three longer pieces, The Lost Notebook, Death of a Chieftain and Three Last Things respectively, all constructed in fine detail with a masterful understanding of human nature.
In fact, The Lost Notebook overshadows all the stories that follow, except perhaps Three Last Things, with its portrayal of two characters’ groping exploration of freedom and immortality while still trapped in their adolescent visions of grandeur. Using the first person, Montague draws attention to a young Irish poet touring Paris during a summer when he meets a troubled young American woman, and there begins a petulant affair. As he fumbles in bed so does she fumble with her aspirations to be a painter. The metaphors in it are everything from sumptuous to galling – in sharp contrast to the more languorous yet still ambitious Death of a Chieftain — as the couple explores Paris, its museums, their paintings and sculptures, its tradition-laden streets brimming with opportunities for each to discover more about the other.
Despite the suggestion that sexual maturity has much to do with its artistic counterpart, the author keeps reminding you that they aren’t simply spanned by yearning. In fact, he often seems to reflect that the only true freedom that can be experienced in between birth and death is to be found in the bedroom. Montague alludes to this opinion in the ultimate Three Last Things, a profound meditation on what death could mean simply by virtue of being the end of a lifetime.
The other, shorter pieces are remarkable too, but just not as spectacular. A personal favorite is A Love Present, a story of a young boy who finds love residing in the proverbial last place that he’s looking, but still written with a warm conviction that makes you want to relive the episode. Another such tale is Sugarbush, I Love You So.
A Ball of Fire holds you with stories that start and end similarly but leave you with hard-earned insights that soothe. The reader is bound to chance upon moments frothing with just the same emotions you remember experiencing in similar instances from your life. To this end, and in the company of Montague’s poetic penmanship, the book is unforgettable.
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I wrote this for The Hindu Literary Review under the title ‘Life distilled’. It was published online on August 3, 2013.
For intimacy, move apart.
A paper published last week in the Journal of Communication indicates that couples in long-distance relationships could be more intimate than those in geographically close ones. The researchers, Crystal Jiang and Jeffrey Hancock, think this is because partners could be adapting more optimistically to each other behaviours to compensate for the mediating communication technology’s shortcomings. While the study is definitely not representative because of statistical limitations, it suggests that an erstwhile atypical social interaction could actually have a larger role to play in social networks than thought. Here’s more by me for The Hindu.
Temper worsening? Could be the climate.
A study of studies by economists from Princeton and UCal, Berkeley, has found that as the climate worsens due to global warming, human violence is likely to get more frequent and intensified. The economists don’t know the precise terms of this intriguing relationship, but think a broad range of factors including neurophysiology and economic duress could be driving it. One significant finding is that one standard-deviation’s increase in some key climate variable’s value, like temperature, is likely to cause a whopping 14% rise in violence.
The study is also important, claimed Edward Miguel, one of the authors from UCal, because it provides a lot of quantitative evidence to their claims that was missing earlier. It tracked the climate and human conflicts since 8,000 BC, and studied them in a regression framework that threw up the positive correlation conclusion. I corresponded with Prof. Miguel on this for my story in The Hindu. Also, here’s the abstract of their paper.
Two cultures. Two families. Brought together by two lovers.
Free market capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to the rise of capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving one’s fellow man.
– Walter E. Williams (via donttreadonvirginia)
To survive, capitalism must be accompanied by accountability.
Amar, Bose of sound, is dead at 83
Unlike the last name of Satyendra, Amar’s never prompted the frenzy of nationalist appropriation that gripped many when talking about their work. That’s perhaps because, even though Amar Bose’s connection to India was meagre at best, he made a global name for himself and his iconic brand, Bose Corp., through such enviable traits as an uncontrollable curiosity, originality and and a Feynmanesque independence. Right from Bose’s radio-repairing enterprise at 13 to his demise at 83 (on July 12), he’d been audacious and also carefully preserved the resources that allowed him to be audacious. I wrote an obituary to this great man for The Hindu, with Narayan Lakshman and Anuj Srivas.