Sony’s Fancy New Cameraphone

Not just for techies, but possibly artists too. Have a look at this new Sony Ericsson K790 Camera Phone. Cameras have been in cell phones for a couple of years now, but to my mind what this changes is the quality and, consequently, the whole point. While initial camera phones produced blurry, pixelated, essentially useless images, this model, with a mechanical autofocus and 3.2 megapixels will produce something similar in quality to a decent if lower-end digital camera. Since people carry their cellphones almost everywhere these days, this means an owner of this unit could capture every odd slant of light, chance happening or random moment of beauty s/he might come across in their daily life, all at good enough quality to print out a 5×7 shot.

To some, the potential for such relentless mass cataloguing is troubling, reducing moments to mere fodder for documentation. But the manner in which this cold bit of technology could be used to share and inspire is also full of hope. Remember those evenings, say in the dead of winter, when you walked home as the sun set, with both sky and snow orange and perfect, your camera tucked away at home untouched since summer and you thinking “man I wish I could show this to someone”? Now you can.

Tea Forte

It’s tea that looks cool – what else do I need to say? Other than that you can order it online and that, besides the alluring aesthetics, I can personally vouch for the great taste – especially the blackcurrant.

Hey kids… Well, I am off to work here.

Of course this means my experimentation in blogdom may come to an end as it’s unlikely I will have consistent enough access to the internet.

But it also means that I’m off to work at a remote Abbey (albeit in the shop there) near the west coast of Ireland. It’s not often I get to say this, so: go ahead, feel jealous of me…

Nonetheless, do keep in touch as I will attempt to do the same.

-Nav

Hello all… Just to share, here are some pics of a real live Irish St. Patrick’s Eve and Day. They may not show up as I’m new at this, so you may have to click on those little boxes. -Nav

I arrived in Galway after dark, tired, sweeping in from Shannon airport on a ghostly, empty bus, ears still plugged from the flight. I was feeling disoriented and spun: yet again, here was another city and alien sights and sounds. Fear began to creep round the edges of my mind. Could it be that I was finally beginning to miss home? The bus pulled into a town square and off I got. Ears dead and eyes squinting, the first thing I notice is the smell – a sour, smoky odour, pungent but oddly familiar. It strikes me that it seems to be the same smell from roadside fires in India, small blazes fuelled by cow dung around which rickshaw drivers and hawkers huddled. Here, it turns out, it is the odour of bog peat fires, which some still use to heat their homes.

Weeks later, I walk through Galway, unemployed, a little depressed and bored. I stroll down an area of what was once was called High Street, now very simply and obviously named Shop Street. As I was walk through the crowds, I am beset by a blonde Scandinavian charity volunteer who, trying to get me to stop, places a hand on my shoulder and suddenly spits some garbled Hindi at me – “Hello, teek hai, ik mint, teek hai?’. What the hell was going on?

I had gotten off the plane from Delhi stunned and dazed. My time in India had beaten me and left me sore, bewildered by difference, overwhelmed by life. And yet here, in this country so much closer to home, this romanticised corner of the English-speaking world, that trip chased me still, as if I still had lessons to learn about culture and difference, still had vestiges of my youth I needed to finally discard.

We live in the centre of Galway, our apartment flanked by at least three pubs and two clubs. At around twelve every night, shortly after last call, bar patrons spill out, stumbling onto the streets. I am often awoken by the sound of yelling, bottles smashing against the wall below our window, tear-filled arguments and fights breaking out. I often picture these moments in my head, the wild flailing limbs of a drunken fight, the loss of control and sense, the look on someone’s face when you know they have stopped caring about drawing a little blood; at this time of night they are out for something more. Each time, my heart races and my mind scrambles to make sense of this madness, this brutal reverie.

Under the covers in our dark room, the world outside becomes enormous and terrifying, a late-night drunken warzone, all of Ireland irrationally and suddenly becoming a violent, booze-fuelled free-for-all. It is silly of me to think this but I know that there is something to hold onto here: I know that tomorrow, in the peaceful light of morning, somehow these late-night meanderings will spill over into the day, unfairly colouring my thoughts, tipping them past rational objectivity.

At the library where I was a steward for a month or so, I can tell that there’s a long history of ‘the drink’. A couple of times, I think I smelled alcohol on the breath of those there, students and employees, at around noon. But perhaps it was mouthwash, I am not sure. Perhaps my mind was playing tricks on me. Sometimes it seems hard to reconcile the extremes – on one hand, the shelves full of Yeats and Joyce and Larkin and Synge and on the other, the broken glass I must step over each morning on my way out. I am sure there are those who might wish to bring prohibition to Ireland. It isn’t quite as ludicrous as you might think. A pre- St. Patrick’s Day newspaper editorial claimed that “drinking and fighting are in our blood. How can we be expected to control ourselves when the bars open in the afternoon?”. Still, I cannot in good conscience simply harp on the negative. The Irish pub is perhaps my fondest experience of Ireland yet. Their carpets, their deep, rich wood, the sense of community, permanence and history that flows through them – I spend as much time in them as I am able, making each round, creamy pint of Guinness or Murphy’s stout last as long as I can. There are few things as satisfyingly ‘Irish’ as sitting in a pub, clothes damp from the incessant drizzle, bones tired and achy from the damp, sipping on a good pint as trad flows through the speakers with animated discussion all around.

Sean, a witty, disarming fellow at work, is of this latter, more positive opinion. He wholeheartedly enjoys what some might call the finest Ireland has to offer: a few pints of the black stuff, well-told tales and some good craic. Once at work, we leaned on a couple of sorting shelves and chatted idly, as we were often wont to do. I listened enthralled – and, I must sheepishly admit, a touch jealous, for my own tolerance for alcohol is notoriously low – as he told of getting fifteen pints in him the night before and expounded on his approach to drink. He described how tourists, on hearing about the craic at an Irish pub, roll in at ten and throw back four, five or even six pints, staggering out of the pub at close, drunk past coherence, being sick in the streets. Going on, he described the Irish superiority to the foreign way, the slow steady pace of two to three pints an hour (which I must say, seemed to me not at all slow and would leave me far from steady) spread out over a full evening, all with the eventual result that, “while it’s true that he may have had ten or fifteen pints, the Irish fella’ on the other hand, is less drunk than your man who had five or six”.

After saying this he paused a bit to wait for my reaction, perhaps considered the surprised grin on my face, then, with an air of finality, said:
“But, well, it’s a cultural thing. It’s an Irish thing”.

A sour, smoky smell creeps round the edges of my mind. But no matter. The conversation ends here. We say our temporary goodbyes as gray rain falls outside the window. We each head off to our own, quiet corner of the library to sort piles of books – history, astronomy, literature, whatever – and place them, neatly, in straight rows upon the shelves.

So there we sat, the two of us, my Dadi and I. Despite the crisp air, the morning winter sun was brittle and sharp. I moved to the shade, periodically warming my feet in the rays as the hills of Masoori hovered in the distance against a crystalline blue sky, outlines of a city upon them. My grandmother remained in the sun, grateful for the warmth I found to be too much. The serene marble courtyard was cold but couldn’t keep out the heated sounds of Deradoon; horns blared in the distance, dogs barked next door and scooters rattled and spluttered by.

My Dadi watched the leaves and was glad that there was no breeze. We ate tamarinds and were disappointed by the lack of sourness. I think back to stories my father told me as Toronto, grey and cold, leaned in at the window listening: of sour purple fruits bought at the roadside, doused in salt and cayenne and shaken in earthen pots until the skin ruptured and burst; and the juice would run down your fingers, sparkle in the sunlight and stain your hands. The servant brought out tea and we sipped it in silence, each wrapped in a shawl, each the same beige colour and each with a different smell.

I couldn’t keep warm in the shade but the sun would feel hot after just a few minutes under its glare. I moved back and forth trying to find a rhythm, trying to achieve a moment of moderation as I struggled with these unabashed extremes of flavour, colour, mood and temperature.

My mother comes outside, freshly bathed, slathered in SPF 60 and I breathe a sigh of relief. Someone familiar is here. Perhaps she can translate this all for me: the street-hawkers’ cries, my grandmother and maybe my confusion. She wraps a shawl around her, sits down and makes small talk with my Dadi. Understanding almost nothing I watch amazed that, though approaching sixty, when she speaks to her mother-in-law, in my mum I can still see that demure bride of thirty-five years ago. There is something in the way she happily defers, something about the way she holds herself that makes me remember: they are working according to rules I do not know. This place is not, as I have told myself so many times, a second home.

My mother continues to chat with my gran and I listen intently, longing to participate. But bored with what quickly becomes white noise, I drift off and wonder what it would be like to be able to speak here. I would ask the things that fascinate me, the things that, if I had grown up here, would probably bore me: what was my father like as a child?; what did you think of Mama?; tell me stories Dadima, tell me what it was like when the land was cleaved in two and millions were on the move. I wanted to make the standard answers mine, so that they would tie me to this place and these people, answers so I could see the red thread that ran from pre-partition Pakistan, through London and across the Atlantic to find itself, frayed and weary, in Toronto’s Annex.

But there was no way to get these answers from my Dadi. I suppose I could have asked my Mum to translate but I knew too much would be lost: too much the inflection of the voice, too much the choice of words, too much of which images and moments invoked – all the things that I rely on to create hi-stories. Robbed of my ability to read the nuances of speech, I sat there, defeated.

My grandmother had sat there intently listening to mum speak. Approaching ninety, she still has a quiet but significant presence – there is something yet simmering behind her calm, now weathered exterior. And as if she instinctively understood that I veered on the edge of something, before I left that day she spoke to me about who I was and who I should be. She gently encouraged me to learn what she called ‘my language’ so that I could also hold on to (or perhaps invent) my Punjabi identity. Perhaps she secretly hoped that, one day, we might have more than a stuttered, broken conversation so that I too could be a part. I hoped it too. And despite not agreeing, despite having little faith in the idea of cultural identities at all, I understood her perspective, I felt it.

Yet I protested: how was I to learn Punjabi when I no longer even lived with my parents, the only people from whom I might feasibly learn? The sun crept over the cool courtyard, casting shadows. My Dadi, a sharp, literate woman, looked at me, frowning, and thought for a second. There was an expression of surprise and confusion on her face. Sensing it was an important part of the puzzle, this mystery who looked like her son but understood almost nothing she said, she pushed me: for what possible reason did I live by myself?

You see, to my Dadi, living alone in the same city as your parents before marriage seemed like a very odd idea. The notion that one might voluntarily move out of a family home to live alone – well, more than being just foreign, I think it struck her as downright sad. My mother turned to me and shook her head.

“She doesn’t understand the concept.”

It is easy to mistake my mum’s explanation for flippancy or condescension. But quite the opposite, my mother was simply saying that the idea was actually foreign in a literal sense of the word. My grandmother was neither speaking out of a blind, backward mentality nor a rigid conservatism. She was aware and went so far as to state that “it’s not like the past when parents could boss their children around and tell them what to do”. She was just trying to make sense of what seemed like willful separation from that which one should always seek.

And really, how was I to explain to her that in order to become my own person I needed my freedom? What exactly did I want freedom from and what did I want freedom to do? Even if we could speak the same language, how was I going to explain the differing trajectories of our worlds in a way that would give her a satisfying response to one, simple question: why did I want to be alone?

And you know what? At that point, it seemed pretty bloody odd to me too.

My second shock arrived: while saying that which all of my peers would accept as simple common sense, for a moment, I felt like a selfish, petulant child, kicking and screaming for his own apartment. As my words echoed through a network of caves, I caught their reflection from another side and I saw myself through my Dadi’s eyes: a misguided child, let loose and gone wrong on the other side of the world.

I like picking fights, particularly those that involve my identity and my right to define it. But my strength had vanished. To my surprise, the certainties upon which I based my identity – that there are some things that I believed to be true – crumbled. Here, not only was my language of no use, nor were my ideas. Because think about it – how was I going to tell my ninety-ish grandmother that sitting in the deafening silence alone was better than spending time with my parents? How was I to tell a woman who has spent her life believing family trumps all, this widow who now has little save her children that being free to, I dunno’, stay up late and listen to music was more important than being with my family? How is it that that which seemed almost axiomatically true but a few months ago seemed so ludicrous now?

And all I managed to muster was that ‘over there, in the West, life is just like that’. That was all I had.

But the poverty of my answer wasn’t about language. Had we spoken the same one, I would have been forced to say the same thing. Because at that point, what else do you say? I picked up my chair and moved into the sun. A few minutes later, resigning myself, I moved back into the shade.

I didn’t feel comfortable until a couple of hours later when my cousins came to pick me up and I found myself in the back of a car once more. Hurtling along a highway, I stared out the window at roads that had no curbs, at a sky that seemed to melt imperceptibly into the ground and thought: I was returning to Chandigarh, to more conversations in languages I didn’t know about subjects I didn’t understand. I was returning to that which I never leave, the foreignness of the familiar, the familiarity of the foreign. And in that car, I sighed a long, bittersweet sigh of relief.

At least I got to spend a few hours at home, on the road, rushing through tree-lined highways, dipping in and out of the sparkling, brittle sunlight and the cool, damp shade.

We write, I suppose, because we feel we have something to share. I guess that’s the point of all my emails. While normally I might feel arrogant and pretentious, the impersonal distance of the electronic and the allure of travel somehow justified my ‘mass mailings’ in my mind. It was that same, hopefully humble thought that was behind my ‘India emails’ – I just wanted to say, ‘hey, I’ve done stuff, been places and I think stuff – here it is’. Trouble is, to say the least, they weren’t received as I might have hoped. I’m now reluctant to say more.

But this too is the push behind my tepid forays into fiction. I feel like there is something I wish to show, something I wish to share, something about myself or life I wish to capture in the invisible spaces of a narrative. But, particularly ‘post-India-emails’, I often feel silly and pretentious doing it, as if what is said is meaningless and saying it futile.

But, bitter narcissist to the bitter end, I still have things to say. I’m thinking, a lot these days, about my place, my future and how to reconcile my terribly suburban and mainstream consciousness with my quite genuine feelings that going with the flow is neither healthy for me nor the world. So, for the time being, I’ve decided to start a blog and start it with this entry. In all honesty, it’s just a less intrusive form of my mass emails. But at least this way, I can satisfy my urge to ramble without presumptuously cluttering people’s inboxes. And hey, if you don’t want to read it, you can just stop.

Anyway, what prompted this particular return to my rants and ramblings was my recent reflection after, firstly, reading an article in The Nation called “Queer Kong” and, secondly, seeing Brokeback Mountain. The latter act – the film – moved me in a way that a film hadn’t in a long time. The picture simply seemed to ache, quietly and beautifully. The former – the written, academic piece – made me furrow my brows.

The author of “Queer Kong” suggested that Peter Jackson’s King Kong was, in a sense, ‘more queer’ than Brokeback because it hovered on the verge of speaking an impossible love. While Brokeback’s romance is no longer as silent, ‘evil’ or impossible as it once was, Kong’s literal romance – i.e. ‘interspecies’ – certainly is, and was thus the ‘queerer’ of the two. What caught my attention was the writer’s reading of the moment before Kong’s death. There is an instant of silent hesitation before Kong’s famous fall where Watts’ character stands, between Kong and her lover, broken. The moment of hesitation before she returns to her human lover’s embrace, says the writer, is the moment of silent impossibility, the un-speakable emotion of love for an ape.

Now, to someone currently in modern academics, this sounds awfully familiar. It’s the kind of thing we’ve read – heck, written –a hundred times, the kind of reading to which you respond “neat, that’s a cool idea” and not much more. These types of readings – suggestions of a symbolic resonance or the elucidation of a narrative subtext of a given moment – are kinda’ what ‘we academics’ do.

But something about all of this nags at me and has more generally been nagging at me for some months now. What does it mean to ‘make a reading’ like this? I know I like doing it and I know I like reading others’ ‘readings’ – but not much more. During this period of homelessness, I feel I’ve forgotten everything I’ve learnt – partly because I never believed it anyway. What I’m curious about is what did the writer’s statement mean? What does it mean to say that a moment in a text is ‘this’ or ‘that’? How did we get here?

I guess my standard answer is this. The film is a particular manifestation of an almost infinite number of discursively inflected narratives. These narratives exist symbiotically with the material and ideological conditions of their production such that the narratives of race, sex, desire, personhood etc. blah blah both enable and are products of a given material-ideological system. The film, being a symbiotic, generative ideological node within a discursive matrix, isn’t anything ‘new’ but a specific and localised manifestation of the ‘bigger’ narratives and, at best, can only use the epistemological and symbolic systems of the narratives that produced it – and, of course, vice versa. So when this writer says that the moment of Watts’ silence is about an impossible love, he is saying one of two things: 1) The text, as an integral part of a given system of meaning, is reflective of some dominant discursive strands concerning pair-bonding, race and gender etc.; these discourses are made manifest in their own narrativisation; 2) that the writer him or herself, as part of this discursive matrix, can read the text in a manner that elucidates or produces readings that ‘reflect-produce’ the aforementioned strands of discourse.

But despite these very familiar options, the first thing that actually popped into my head was, well, how silly. Mr. Jackson had no goals of suggesting anything about the impossibility of the articulation a certain kind of love. That was just Naomi Watts’ character watching her beloved, fuzzy Kong plunge to his death. It was about emotion and not an epistemological boundary.

‘Course naturally, I am not allowed to say these things. They reek of authorial intent – or even worse, new criticism. What we’re pretty sure of is that an auteur like Jackson can do things for what he thinks is one reason but can actually be doing them for another. Besides, in making a film at all he’s just fulfilling his socially and ideologically constructed role as ‘filmmaker’ and functions almost like an unconscious conduit for things bigger than he is. Right?

But it’s the ‘actually’ that bugs me here. In saying ‘actually’ I, like The Nation writer, verge on positing the ontological existence of my interpretation – that this scene is ‘actually’ this and not that. Most criticism is phrased this way, suggesting that, at worst, all previous interpretations were off and this one has got it or that, at best, in the manner of Bhabha et al, it took the critic to draw out this ‘small t’ truth from the kind posing as the ‘big T’ sort.

Yes, I’m being a little obvious. The deconstructionist might simply respond “what are you, an idiot”? All sentences in their predication on logocentrism are semantically erased as they are written, so of course I can say things like “this moment is this” because we know that we’ll never know what the is is. And, no I totally didn’t have sexual relations with that TA.

If that’s the case, then all criticism – and well, everything now written – is done with a hopeful nod and wink. To wit – I might not ultimately be able to tell you anything about the film or text but I can use them to tell you something it made me think about life or art or prejudice? Is this the point of the academic? If it is, then whither literary/artistic criticism? And whither the texts? Why do we even need the texts? Do we just need them to prove all along that the things we thought about capitalism and prejudice are in fact – God – ‘true’? This is what has been ‘ultimately’ bugging me – what is it that is said about the text in moments of critique like this? If the moment of silence in Kong can be read as the filmic realisation of the epistemological silence of forbidden loves, so what? We know damn well it can also be read as the peak of a narrative arc predicated on ‘that’ll teach that nigger cunt for thinking about touching our women’. So what if we make politically responsible readings of *cough* jungle fever? Everything is a reading because everything is text. All we seem to do is add to the chorus of readings.

And so finally, we find ourselves at the same question as always. That same sad, resigned and weary query – what is the point of all of this? And hell, even I expected that what would come now would be an inversion of that weariness, some humble teleology for all these ‘readings’. But as it turns out, what I discovered while writing this is that – well, I don’t really care what the answer is.

Sure, I think there’s something important there, something that needs to be drawn out of these uncritical mappings of supposed ontological certainties onto the conveniently blank canvases of textual aporia. Part of me is scared that it’s ultimately Leavisite criticism transposed onto theory – those who make the strongest readings win. But for me – well, I have stopped caring whether the answer is the final meaninglessness of what I do or whether it’s about the contribution of healthy discussion to a given discursive field. I’ve given up wanting to do ‘the right thing’, that impossible, unattainable and abstract goal.

What I do want now is something else. What I want, more than anything on earth, is to simply be honest. I want to be honest about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. That and nothing more. I’m finding it harder to care about the political ramifications of my academic work. I know so much of it is ego, is privilege, is my procrastinated response to how boring a career at IBM seems. It’s not that I’ve abandoned all hope. I’m just tired of fighting with myself. I’m tired of wondering why I do what I do and whether it’s actually ever going to make a difference. It has left me crippled and impotent and I can’t keep doing this forever. Now, I simply want to know why I do something. That and nothing more.

If you’ll note then: ultimately, the reflection on Queer Kong was about my own life and my own path and not the films in question or the article in The Nation. Heh.

But it was a contrast that started this – between an academic response to two films and my own emotional response to one: Brokeback. It needs returning to. There seems sometimes to be a gap between criticism and its object – that criticism has descended into often using texts as mere ideological jumping-off points. Probably, it’s because what we hope underneath our raging better-than-you cynicism, what I hope for beneath my condescending verbosity, is that what I do is part of a larger liberatory politics that brings the darker shadows of capitalism and postmodernity to light. So I write about identity. I spend countless hours – which, I should note, could be spent listening to more music or just drinking more red wine – wondering about epistemological difference, about the contrasting frames of reference involved in the construction of the diasporic self. I hope. So I write.

But my stories? My God, ‘art’? They are just to pass the time. These are just narcissistic indulgences. When I look at others’ stories and tease out meanings and structures and narratives, this is when I work and this when I hope. Right?

But we wandered into Brokeback a touch late. There was no introduction, no credits. No title sequence and no endless stream of ads. We just walked in off the streets lined with shops and gas stations and sat down in the enormous and serene Southern American landscape, just like that. And then watched two men fall in love. There was no frame of reference, no mental backdrop against which to measure. There were no ‘queens’ wandering through the gritty streets of New York or Toronto. There was no ‘male femininity’, no alternative lifestyle, no clearly carnivalesque deconstruction of gender roles or patriarchy. There was nothing that I could easily relate to the things I had seen or heard before. And as sad as it may be to admit, in the simple narrativisation of two men in love, for the first time in my life I was able to look at a gay relationship and see just a relationship. I know, I know, dangerous words – but I don’t mean simply a same-sex replica of a heteronormative one; but a gay couple, together, in all that that entails. I am aware that the movie was not without its problems, its issues. But there was also just a film. There was a relationship, full of heartache and redemption and betrayal and love. There were shots of breath-robbing beauty. I can’t get it out of my head. And at the end of it, I was changed. This is why those landscapes have penetrated my dreams, why the quiet lull of the film simmers still under my consciousness. I was left changed.

Brokeback, in its own small way, transformed me. Foucault, Derrida, Spivak et al – they help me to understand why.

I haven’t found the answer, but perhaps I’ve found all we can ever expect to find: an answer that works for me, for now. Surprising myself in the process, here’s what I think I’m saying. I will give in and enjoy the luxuries of my ridiculously privileged middle-class lifestyle as such:

I will head off to a dingy library, bury myself in some arcane, obtuse text and be an academic.

And when I want to be political, when I wish to make a difference, when I want to hurl my very body against the iron walls of prejudice and greed, I will simply do this:

Sitting at a desk, red wine splashed into my glass, I will, casting my thoughts outward, scratch out some lines about love or life, and for no apparent purpose, do my best to be an artist.

I haven’t stopped hoping. In fact, I think I might just be starting to.

Welcome to Scrawled in Wax, home to a few unabashedly temporary and fleeting musings. While for now this will largely be home to my travel-inspired ramblings, expect to find all manner of subjects here, from tech to academics to popular culture. Eventually, I hope to find a more specific focus and run with it, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy the meandering journey there. Feel free to post comments, forward the address or drop me a note. -Nav