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crazyfish

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  1. crazyfish

    The Speed of Progress

    By crazyfish,

    I was attending a physics conference in Puri, India when in the hotel lobby, I literally dropped what I was doing to read the paper's headline about the Apex Court recriminalising homosexuality. My reaction was shock, but then muted to a shrug.
     
    Take this for example. An Indian colleague of mine, a fellow particle physicist, 30, about to get married, is still trying to convince the fiancee's family not to pay a dowry. Not to mention that his own family still hasn't come around to accepting his views on the dowry, which from his estimates will be a lot of money because he has a PhD. At least the girl is of the same brahmin caste as he is. His previous girlfriend was of a different caste and that was very hard for his family to swallow, but luckily or unluckily for him, the girl rejected him. He's educated to the top tier that places his family far above the unwashed unsophisticated masses who are struggling on less than a dollar per day.
     
    How could I be shocked about court decision when my colleague is still contending with his family over dowries, when it's still frowned upon for women to travel alone, when I can't get running water of drinkable quality?
     
    I'm not saying gay rights takes a back seat to destructive sexism or economic underdevelopment, but I feel one needs to be extraordinarily patience about these issues. You really can't force progress from the top-down especially when politicians are angling to cast the gay rights issue as western immorality vs pure Indian culture.
     
     
    Then consider in the meantime, the diplomatic row with US brewing over an Indian female diplomat who was stripped-searched and booked on charges of underpayment of wages The press and politicians have made noise about diplomatic immunity, how the US has tarnished Indian pride. (Curiously no one is talking about the Indian pride of the diplomat's poor maid who was reputed to be have been paid 3 bucks/hr). The government has even gone so far as to place US diplomats under extra legal scrutiny and played stupid tit for tat games. I'm sure, in a few days, the Indian police will find a suitable crime to arrest US diplomats, just so as to humiliate them. And eh look, one politician has even proposed that any US diplomat suspected of homosexuality should be booked on criminal charges ... How convenient.
     
    One thing is certain: change isn't happening fast enough. But it is happening. The Apex court decision was a reversal of a liberal lower court decision. My colleague is proof-positive of the incremental progress that is happening all over India.
  2. crazyfish

    False Epiphanies

    By crazyfish,

    One of my favorite authors is Alan Hollinghurst, who won the booker prize for The Line of Beauty. His prose is what captivates me the most, lush and lyrical and beautiful.
     
    I was working my way through booker prize winners when I first came across The Line of Beauty. I didn't know what the plot was about when I opened it. I thought the first couple pages were boring. Just when I was going to put the book down, the MC puts out a gay personal ad in the paper. And bam I was hooked. Yeah ... I'm shallow like that.
     
    But the subject of this blog post is false epiphanies, which brings up his debut fiction released back in the 80's, The Swimming Pool Library. I just finished it a few days ago. The prose is exquisite as always.
     
    Well it is literary, there isn't much of a story. It just follows a rich guy in 80's london before the AIDS scare. He spends his days having random sex with strangers in parks, porno theatres, bathrooms etc. He keeps paramours with boys younger and poorer than him. When he isn't fucking, he goes to a exclusive swimming pool frequented by gay men and fantasizes about the next piece of ass. The one meaningful functional relationship in his life is the one he has with his best friend. He's lazy, conceited, shallow and extremely self-unaware. But he isn't malicious or wicked or a hard ass. He just doesn't care to lead a more meaningful life.
     
    IN between his fucking adventures, he is reading up on the diaries of a gay lord, for whom he's considering writing a biography. The diaries dates back to the 1920's when the lord worked in the Sudan. The old lord is another old dunderhead who is also just as sex-obsessed over his boy servants as the MC. While you can excuse the MC because he's young and desirable, the lord however is old and pitiable and just pathetic. You can already string the consequences. If the MC doesn't change his ways, he'll end up like the old lord.
     
    A few things happen in the book that cause him consternation, the most significant of which is his best friend being caught in some trouble. And in the last couple pages, the MC thinks about changing for the better. He actually thinks about it, dreams about leading a more meaningful life. Then he tries to secure the help the friend needs. The ploy fails, not because of his fault though. But the setback is enough for him to go stomping back to the swimming pool and drooling over a nice piece of ass. And the book ends.
     
    Now will MC follow up on the ploy? Who knows. But I have faith he will or the friend will really be screwed. But will the MC change his freewheeling ways? Probably not.
     
    Basically, Hollinghurst employs a false epiphany technique. Bring the MC feel change, but when the MC actually tries to act it, it fails for some reason or another. Chekhov is a matter of this technique in his short stories. A false epiphany is extremely realistic. Think about the times in your life, you wanted to do something, but you didn't follow through.
     
    And you know, Hollinghurst's MC changing and discovering the power of love and sacrifice would have been trite and silly. It wouldn't have made much real sense. But then again, the story doesn't leave me satisfied, depressed really.
  3. crazyfish
    From A Single Man by Chris Ischerwood
    One adjective hahaha. Two adjectives hahaha. Three hahaha, four, five, six, seven, (Work it Chris!), eight, nine adjectives hahaha. **Cue lightening and thunder** Sesame Street anybody?
    On a minor thought, the book is ok reading, if you don't mind literary fiction.
    I prefer the movie version then again the movie version is very different from the book. For one the MC in the movie is a lot nicer than the MC in the book. While the MC in the book does have a lot deal with, I found myself rolling my eyes at him a lot. Especially his epiphany moment didn't move me in the slightest. In fact, I found it rather trite. Anyway I like the writing style. I can read through crap as long as you write pretty.
  4. crazyfish
    Ok, while I strenuously object to any US-led military action in Syria ***you only need to look at the clusterfuck of Egypt , Libya, Mali to see why*** I find Putin's op-ed in the NY times highly ironic, given Russia's a country that's very backward on gay rights, backward on free speech rights, and, consider the fact that Putin wouldn't so much as allow dissenters a full page spread in the Pravda.
     
    Oh look, a museum in Moscow was raided by the police for its 'political art' for depicting Obama and Putin in the nude
     
    http://www.iol.co.za/news/back-page/obama-putin-penis-painting-confiscated-1.1573170#.Uiz2FCTD85s
     
    See the art here in the full glory. NSFW. http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1335824/thumbs/o-WRESTLING-570.jpg
     
    Now that's hilarious.
     
    America may not be exceptional, but it is something.
  5. crazyfish
    I run across dialogue in which people say what they mean and mean what they say. For instance, two characters who sit and talk about their vulnerable circumstances without any hint of obfuscation. They have a heart to heart straight to the bone talk. Or the dialogue in which two characters engage in passionate duel over their beliefs without a hint of subtlety either.
     
    I understand some readers derive some vicarious pleasure or emotions in these scenes, but really to me, they mostly feel syrupy, dull, and utterly trite.
     
    People don't say what they mean most of the time, especially in emotionally bare moments because people are inherently protective of themselves. We fear rejection, flouting social conventions, wronging someone, confronting unsavory aspects of our psyche, or because you know most of the time, we are not even aware of what we are feeling, we can't give a name to it. And so we use hedge words, or outright lie, or speak laterally, or be coy and speak in code. If your characters are inherently dramatic, meaning they have inner tensions that threaten to tear them apart, they will have fears and insecurities that will inhibit them from saying what they mean most of the time.
     
    Anyway back to being a crazy fish.
  6. crazyfish
    Whom we love is as much a statement about those whom we reject. In the glut of romantic fiction out there, a lot of books gloss over the rejection inherent in the romantic love because really why do we want to feel sad for the poor sod when there's a ooey gooey love to gush over. We gloss it over. We find ways to minimize it. Or we turn the rejected character into an asshole, someone who deserved it, a crazy idiot, or worse, an other.
     
    This brings me back to the book I was reading Bitter Eden. The story is much about pure love as it is about the cruel rejection that made the love possible. Warning, there are spoilers. Actually it's the whole plot summary. Either way you're warned.
     
    The narrator Tom is a masculine, single, POW, and by default straight. He first bonds with the married Douglas, who is effeminate and mothering. No one in the prison camp really likes the fragile Douglas. Even the self-identified gay prisoners don't like him. Tom eventually comes to accept Douglas because underneath his fussy mothering ways, Douglas is loyal and honorable.
     
    After a year of being Douglas' 'mate'(all platonic), Tom is more open to his queer side. He's part of a theatre group run by a gay pow. He regularly submits himself to have his portrait drawn by another gay prisoner who 'studies his face but draws his genitals.' Then he runs into another british pow, married Danny, who's a man's man and is for all intents and purposes straight. Danny is simply more fun. The bond between Tom and Danny is natural, quick, and goes deeper because they both share wounds of childhood traumas. And oh, Danny can't stand Douglas in the slightest.
     
    Tom rejects Douglas for Danny. Make no mistake, the rejection is cruel and pure aggression. And you know if Tom hadn't learnt to accept Douglas, he would not have had the capacity to love Danny. The latter half of book is sweet as much as it is bitter, Tom and Danny blossom albeit in their sly not-overtly sexual way while Douglas goes insane.
     
    Throughout the latter half of the book, Tom grapples with his responsibility in Douglas' demise. Yes every man is responsible for his own heart, but was the rejection necessary for true love to flower? I kept hoping the men would look beyond myopic delineations of his and mine and use the spark of love to forge something more universal. You know like a brotherhood of sorts, but that wish is a fantasy really. When the death, hunger, torture, stare at you daily, the urge to possess something for yourself only is all that there is.
     
    The rejection speaks to the struggle between the feminine vs the masculine that permeates the whole book, and how being masculine means the rejection of femininity. When Tom decides to play Lady Macbeth, the experience almost breaks their relationship as the pair go to absurd lengths to re-affirm their masculinity. The irony is while Tom is more willing to explore the queerer side of himself and Danny much less so, it's Danny who wants to continue the relationship after the war ends. But Tom is too afraid. He gets married and doesn't speak to or hear from Danny again until after his death.
     
    A sad book yes, but a real and touching book. Douglas' tragic end rings through to the last pages when Tom in his older years is trying to find some resolution to his complicity. Not only did he let Douglas down, he let Danny down big time.
    It's sad how it takes extreme circumstances to discover hidden dimensions of yourself, but as soon as the pressure goes away and the situation returns to the mundane, your expanded horizons shrink back and everything resets to a bland and stifling normal. In the end Tom wishes to go back to the Bitter Eden of the pow camp. The possibility of creating a new Eden in the midst of his homely, freer, normal is not one he seriously grapples with, and that's just sad.
  7. crazyfish

    Bitter Eden

    By crazyfish,

    Through NetGalley I got a copy of Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika. I'm still working my way through it, but I would definitely recommend it if you're looking high brow queer fiction.. Yeah, yeah. it's literary fiction, but this is the literary fiction done right. Deep and vivaciously haunting with its imagery, yet without the dreary pretentiousness or unlikable characters associated with literary fiction. No, the book isn't easy to read, but you would want to slow down anyway to enjoy its every word.
     
    The story is simple enough,set in WWII , a first person's account of a South African POW captured by first by the Italians in North Africa and gets transferred to Europe. There's quite a bit of bleakness and frankness about death. There's a cruel betrayal. but also there's a lot of affirming male bonding and queer happenstances in his all-around male milieu.
  8. crazyfish

    Hard Characters

    By crazyfish,

    The first iteration of Luke's character in Love and Go was something of a sarcastic, couldn't-care-less character mucking about in a garden of hurt. Fun guy really. If you're interested in reading an unedited version of Love and Go with hardass Luke, ask me. It's probably a better rendition but there was issues with motivation and the like. And I thought I was getting too comfortable writing the same sort of characters, and then I read The Defense by Nabokov which portrayed a disturbed chess player.
     
    And so I came up with a fucked-up Luke. I hope not fucked in a way that's off-putting, but fucked up in an interesting way. He's mess of things. He's gentle, naive. He aims to please. But at the same time, he's apathetic and can be very unyielding. It's a challenge keeping his actions monotone and maintaining a constant tension about him.
     
    Can't say I've succeeded because readers so far complain about his lack of emotion. Unfortunately becoming more emotional isn't part of his character arc. In some sense he's the impact character. He doesn't change, which drives Hao completely crazy towards the end, triggering devastating events. But Luke does have an arc, that of finding personal salvation. It's Hao's challenge to get over himself, ignore Luke's strange manners, and help Luke save himself before it's too late. Whether Hao succeeds or not is still an open question.
  9. crazyfish

    Silly poetry

    By crazyfish,

    Here lies Zebedee Yamilla,

    a particle physicist of intrepid renown.

    Her cosmic love for Attaboy Jack,

    reviled collector of nipples and noses,

    proved her end in this cold, cold ground.

    Valiantly she sought to prove his innocence,

    insanity by reason of neutrino-compactified neurons she said.

    But the many-bodied sneers of the physicist legate derided,

    and the hours amongst water-cerenkov detectors scintillated no light.

    Alas her spirit became renormalized in despair.

    Nothing revealed of wily neutrinos or dimpled neurons,

    Just her love spiraling the infinite world lines of sorrow.

    Then on that fuligin day of his sentencing,

    she cried, his freedom or her death by starvation!

    Now here she lies, our dear Zebedee Yamilla.

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