Don’t you think the joker laughs at you?

And the award for the most magnificently pointless opening paragraph in any of today’s newspaper stories goes to this gem, from the ToI food queen’s review of a restaurant called Konomi:

It’s got to be the best-looking hotel we have in the city – okay, not technically in the city but hey, Gurgaon is Delhi and Delhi is Gurgaon…and we are all together! Remember the “I am the Walrus” act by The Beatles? I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together…elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna…Well, I’m not so sure about the penguin bit but, nonetheless, it all emerges, converges and submerges here.

Typically, the rest of the pun-filled review has nothing to do with the song. Somewhere in the great beyond, the ghosts of Lewis Carroll and John Lennon are cussing mightily. Somewhere in the Antarctica a lonesome penguin is singing “She’s So Heavy…”

By the way, here’s the closing sentence:

It’s expensive, by all standards, but then you, me, he, we are all together here…it’s got the yen for Zen!

Maybe she was just trying for a little nonsense verse of her own?

Mrkgnao...

...is how James Joyce's realist cats pronounce Meow, and this is what I briefly attempted to do when called upon to say "Meow, Delhi!" in a radio studio last evening. In the midst of one of the most hectic weeks of my life (two grandparents in hospitals now – different hospitals – plus there's the minor business of getting married next week, and sundry other work to be done), I found the time to visit the Meow 104.8 FM office, where I had been asked to participate as a blogger-guest on their evening show "Tu Tu Meow Meow", hosted by Ginnie Mahajan. Was a bit nervous when I was invited, but it went off really well – very informal and spontaneous, living-room conversation-ish, and the fact that recent weeks have been so tension-filled probably helped, because I simply couldn't bring myself to get worked up about this. Treated it as a welcome break from the other stuff that’s been going on. Discussed blogging, answered questions I've been asked before in interviews (what is a blog? Are blogs helping middle-class people find their voice? Is it voyeurism? What do you think of personal blogs?), but had the time to give fleshed-out answers, Meow being a channel that talks more than it plays music.

(And yes, I know I should have put up a notification post before the show happened, but 1) I was offline all day yesterday, 2) I wasn’t sure I would even make it to the studio on time until late in the day, and 3) I didn’t particularly want anyone listening in, so there.)

P.S. Read about Greatbong's experiences on Meow here.

Hospital adventures - 3

Sitting outside the X-ray room, I saw a sign that read:

If red light is on,
you are pregnant

I looked up at the bulb above the door. It was on! This was astonishing news! Apart from the implications for my own future, this had to be a medical breakthrough of some sort. No more urine tests. No more ultrasonography. Just go to the hospital, sit facing the room and check the light.

Later, I realised that part of the sign outside the door had been missing; a mischievous intern must have torn it off. The full version was:

DO NOT ENTER THIS ROOM
– If red light is on,
– If you are pregnant

Oh well. I’ll live with the disappointment somehow.

Relieved...

… that Tim Henman and Sania Mirza are out of Wimbledon. I have nothing against these two ladies, but hopefully Star Sports will now deign to show us the matches featuring some of the other players.

Film classics: Closely Watched Trains

I was around 18 when I first saw Jiří Menzel’s Ostře Sledované Vlaky (Closely Watched Trains) at a film festival. At the time, though I enjoyed the film as a collection of little vignettes, it left me unsatisfied on the whole. Looking back, there may have been a problem of preconceived notions: I was heavily into magic realism then, in the afterglow of having read Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, and the tiny scraps of information I had on Closely Watched Trains (this being the pre-Internet age) led me to believe that it was similar in style; that the narrative would include strange and wondrous happenings as exaggerated metaphors for life in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War. Some of the film’s early scenes were whimsical enough to support this theory, so I was rather taken aback by the downbeat ending and the sudden shift from the personal to the political, the reminder of the larger picture.

Closely Watched Trains is set during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in the early 1940s. The film’s central character, Milos Herma – a very likeable young man who manages somehow to be droopy-eyed and wide-eyed all at once – can be seen as a symbol for a country trying to find its place in the world, perhaps even assert itself in a small way; but Milos is also a developed character in his own right, someone we can sympathise with at a human level. The film opens with a wonderfully quirky little scene as young Milos prepares for the first day of his new job at the local railway station. Putting on his uniform, he looks around at portraits of various family members as a voiceover informs us of their achievements, usually laced with farce, e.g., a hypnotist grandfather who tried to halt the Germans by standing in front of their tanks and sticking his arm out. (There is a brief promise of magic realism here: the Germans really do stop for a while, perplexed; but then cold reality takes over, the tanks roll on and granddaddy loses his head.)

Back to the present. At the station, Milos comes under the affectionately patronising guidance of the train dispatcher Hubicka (who, physical resemblance apart, has a smugness that reminded me of Peter Sellers playing Quilty in Kubrick’s version of Lolita). Hubicka turns out to be a train dispatcher in more senses than one; he’s planning to blow up one of the trains carrying ammunition to a Nazi base. The plot moves slowly towards the consummation of this plan, but young Milos is preoccupied with consummation of a different kind; a case of premature ejaculation prevents him from satisfying his girlfriend in bed, and he worries that this prevents him from “being a man”. Extremely depressed, he attempts suicide, survives, and is advised to find an experienced older woman who can ease him into the act - but his insecurities may have bigger repercussions. As if all this weren’t enough, the station attracts controversy because Hubicka has seduced a young typist and (in a bizarre, incongruously good-natured little scene) rubber-stamped her legs and buttocks.

As this summary might indicate, Closely Watched Trains is an immensely entertaining movie (note to friends who fear subtitles in general and the unpronounceable names in central European cinema in particular), full of beguiling little scenes. My favourites include Milos diffidently approaching an old woman and getting distracted by the goose-neck she’s holding between her legs, the encounter with his girlfriend’s puckish photographer-uncle, and the scene with the itinerant Nazi soldiers and the nurses. And of course, the final epiphanic explosion, which makes perfect sense to me now.

Since my first viewing, I’ve been able to see Closely Watched Trains on its own terms: to appreciate how gentle Menzel's direction is and how he places a wry sense of humour at the service of a basically poignant story. Czechoslovakia’s position in the scheme of things had not changed very much in 1966 (when the film was made) from the WWII years – it was still being swept along by much larger forces and events, events that its people couldn’t wholly understand, relate to or do much about. Working in a medium that wasn’t very well established in his country, and faced with continuous restrictions on artistic freedom, Menzel found a way to convey something of this predicament - using methods that were more complex and layered than magic realism. Equally importantly, he also told an engrossing personal story in the process.

[Some previous posts on old films: Yojimbo, 8 1/2, Fearless Vampire Killers, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Badlands, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Fiddler on the Roof, Twelve Angry Men, Peeping Tom, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Strangers on a Train, Eraserhead, Paths of Glory, Deewaar, Junoon]

Grey humour in The Hospital

I think I've blogged before about the creepily satisfying little coincidences that sometimes occur when you’re reading/watching films a lot: how something you've recently read or seen (or experienced) is unexpectedly echoed elsewhere. This has been happening a lot recently. Small example: in Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, I came across two references to Ernest Hemingway's superb novella The Old Man and the Sea – a book I had put down just minutes before picking up the Hosseini. (With the attention span being low these days, it's been convenient to revisit favourite novellas/short stories: in the last few days I've been through the Hemingway as well as Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and short stories by Poe, Saki and Arthur Clarke.)

Then, given my recent experiences in hospitals (problems with bureaucratic inefficiency, general apathy, ridiculously opaque billing, randomness in procedures – all very frightening when you think of how much faith people put in doctors and hospitals), it was bizarre that I switched on the TV last night just in time to see the opening credits of the 1971 film The Hospital. This is a hard-hitting black comedy, built around a superb performance by George C Scott (every bit as good here as he was in any of his other great roles: in Patton, Dr Strangelove or The Hustler). He plays the depressed Dr Bock, undergoing a mid-life crisis, searching for some meaning in his job as a healer, but finding that everything seems to be coming apart in his hospital too.

Actually, I’m not sure “black comedy” is right. For all its madcap possibilities, the humour in The Hospital is a bleak shade of grey. This isn't the sort of film that will make you chuckle out loud so much as smile wanly at the TV screen, nod in recognition while thinking to yourself, "True, true; life really is this grim and hopeless, and that’s funny."

There are a few laugh-out-loud moments in the first few scenes though (assuming you can laugh at avoidable miscommunication that results in the deaths of innocents). The film begins with a brilliantly deadpan voiceover telling us about a patient who is admitted into a large Manhattan hospital, his ailment wrongly diagnosed and then further misinterpreted by an intern – so that what should have been a routine examination ends in tragedy. Anyway, this incident leaves the ward with a prematurely empty bed, which the intern decides to take advantage of by calling a nurse he's been shacking up with in uncomfortable positions in broom closets. ("We got us a real bed," he says gleefully.) Come morning, the intern is found dead on the same bed; apparently, during his post-coital nap, another nurse came in and administered him an IV, thinking he was the previous patient.

All this sounds overblown and slapsticky on paper, but it's played completely straight (except for the goofy look on the intern's face – and even that suggests frat-boy desperation, which is an essentially poignant quality). The film is shot in TV-drama style, the narration is austere, and the other doctors and administrators are concerned about these goings-on, and about finding ways to improve matters. Dr Bock has lines like “What am I going to tell this boy’s parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?” and ”Where do you train your nurses, Dachau?” but he says them wearily, with genuine sadness and outrage. The tone isn't the irreverent, absurdist one of Heller’s Catch-22 or of Robert Altman's M*A*S*H*, where doctors Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John are distinctly unconcerned with such silly things as improving the world.

The Hospital is also a very wordy film, with long monologues where characters engage in self-analysis or social commentary (the scene where Dr Bock goes on about his suicidal feelings, his possible impotence, his strained relations with his family – including a 17-year-old daughter who has had two abortions – works largely on the strength of Scott’s performance, but it does get long-winded). The script is by playwright Paddy Chayevsky, an acerbic social observer who also wrote Sidney Lumet's Network, a satire about network television that seems very prescient today in the reality-TV age. (My sole viewing of Chayevsky was in a video of the 1978 Oscars, where he denounced Vanessa Redgrave for making political remarks in her acceptance speech. Fierce chap. Nothing bright or sunshine-y about him, or perhaps it was just a bad day. Dr Bock reminded me of him.)

Newspaper quote of the day

“Sex toys can have serious repercussions on the Indian way of life”

- BJP leader Kailash Vijayavargiya, reacting to the sale of “vibrating condoms” by the govt-owned Hindustan Latex Ltd

(In related news, a latex puppet of Margaret Thatcher was auctioned yesterday for 5,040 pounds.)

Thoughts on Calvin

Things are still very hectic on the personal front. I haven’t been able to do much fresh reading lately, but have made up for it by revisiting all my Calvin and Hobbes anthologies. One of my many favourites is the Sunday strip Bill Watterson drew in a neo-Cubist style, with Calvin seeing multiple views of every object (the context is that his dad engaged him in a debate and made him see both sides of the issue) and discovering that this is way too much information to process – single-perspective order must be restored. Here’s part of the strip:


In his footnotes at the bottom of the page, Watterson has written: “The idea for this came from my tendency to examine issues until I’m incapacitated by the persuasiveness of all sides.” Relate to that a lot, and often wish I didn’t – multiple perspectives can be crippling and it’s easy to see why we’re conditioned to look for patterns in everything around us, and to seek (or make up) convenient explanations.

Was discussing Calvin and Hobbes with a friend over a few glasses of Old Monk and she remarked how strange it is that a series built around one of the most alienated characters in all literature should have become so popular across the world – and loved by millions of readers who, if they were ever to meet someone like Calvin in real life, would be scared out of their minds (or at the very least wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him). The darker side of the strip – Calvin’s profound loneliness, his inability to relate to most people and things in the real world – isn’t always acknowledged and I feel a little uneasy when someone speaks about the strip in purely superficial terms, without getting the morbidity of it: I’ve heard, for instance, that it’s all so much fun because Calvin is “so shweet” or “such a loveable brat!”.

Of course, no point in going overboard discussing the darker aspects of a series that has provided so much joy to so many people (and which Watterson himself ended on an unabashedly upbeat note, with the famous last panel that shows Calvin telling Hobbes “It’s a magical world, ol’ buddy – let’s go exploring”). And no harm, I suppose, in people enjoying a comic strip at a superficial level. Still, I do get a little protective when it comes to Calvin’s dark side. As a child I never had anything like his superb imagination (or an imaginary friend with a personality as fleshed out as Hobbes’s), but I can relate to the “outsider” status, and most of all to the contempt for formal education that is a recurrent theme in the strip. (Some of the school/classroom strips - e.g. Calvin fantasising about bombing his school to tiny pieces - are disturbingly familiar because most of my own school memories are unpleasant ones.)

(Also discussed at Old Monk session: how some great Absurdists like Watterson and Scott Adams have managed to live reasonably well-rounded social lives – complete with family and children – despite the many traces of nihilism in their work. Food for thought there, especially in our godless times.)

K K Mahajan, behind the scenes

Wanted to share some photos as a tribute to K K Mahajan, the wonderful cinematographer who began his career in the late 1960s and shot a number of films for such directors as Mrinal Sen (including Bhuvan Shome and Ek Di Pratidin) and Basu Chatterjee (including the delightful Rajnigandha and Chhoti si Baat), and won four National Awards for his work. (Full filmography here.) I’ve been corresponding with K K’s wife Praba, who tells me he’s extremely unwell. She has shared a few old pictures from his work in the 1970s and kindly given me permission to put them up here. These are all from the shooting of Sen’s movies, and I like the impression they create (however true or not) of the rigours of filmmaking at a time when sophisticated technology was unavailable (look at some of these cameras!). Also, of course, the behind-the-scenes candour.

In the first pic, Mrinal Sen is on the left (which is as it should be, if you know anything about his work and his affiliations), with K K next to him.
Daredevilry in Calcutta: Spider-Man had nothing on this.

Not sure what Mr Sen is doing here; looks like a fake-snow set. Maybe Praba can elucidate.
Bell-bottoms rock!
This one is probably from Padatik, since that looks like Simi Garewal in the centre (I haven't seen the film).
And finally, this caricature of K K, drawn by cartoonist Mario Miranda. (Praba tells me K K is a fine gourmet cook; the dish he’s carrying here contains one of his specialties, mutton chops in milk.)[Click photos to enlarge]

P.S. More here from Uma.

'That most plastic and moldable of earths'

"If I am second in the world, it is because so many matches are played on the non-traditional and decadent surface of grass," said Nadal, who sipped upon a post-prandial cup of hot brandied clay in an effort to mask his anger at the mention of what he considers to be a lesser surface. "What is grass but a regrettable parasite upon the pure and pristine clay? And playing well upon clay, upon the very stuff of life, upon the breast of the Earth itself…that is not a trick. That is the very deepest alluvial layer of tennis itself."

Nadal then concluded the dinner by offering his guests homemade iced-clay sundaes.

The Onion explains Rafael Nadal’s special relationship with clay.

Thought for the day

To celebrate 60 years of independence, Bollywood should make a patriotic film about India’s endeavour to become the world’s most populous country by the year 2015. It should star Amitabh Bachchan in a rock-star outfit, with Manoj Kumar in a cameo appearance as Lord Hanuman, who would carry hordes of Lankans back across the ocean to add to India’s numbers.

Amitabh will sing a song from an earlier film: “Kitne baazu, kitne sar, gin le dushman dhyan se.” (“Count our arms and heads, O Enemy, and have some gin while you’re at it.”) The “dushman” would be China, which will suffer an unexplained population decrease, thus helping India realise its goal. The film will be called Chini Kum.

Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns

Little Mariam lives with her mother Nana in a kolba – a small, squalid shack – in a clearing near the Afghan village of Gul Daman. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy cinema-house owner named Jalil Khan; the embittered Nana relishes calling her a harami, telling her she will never have claim to such things as love, family and acceptance, and painting a bleak picture of a woman’s destiny. “What’s the sense schooling a girl like you? It’s like shining a spittoon. You’ll learn nothing of value in schools. There is only one skill a woman like you and me needs, and it’s this: tahamul. To endure. It’s our lot in life.”

But Mariam continues to hope. She loves and hero-worships her father, yearns to be part of his legitimate family, dreams about siblings she’s only heard of, and one day an act of over-enthusiastic, childlike indiscretion leads to the collapse of her world. Orphaned and abandoned, she is hurriedly married off to Rasheed, a middle-aged businessman, and sent to live in Kabul where, as the years pass, her dreams and ambitions fade away.

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns is a sensitively told if slightly uneven story about the crushing of the strong-willed Mariam’s spirit and the opportunity she gets, decades later, to validate her life by helping another innocent – a young girl named Laila, Rasheed’s second wife. We are already familiar with Laila’s past, for Hosseini has introduced her to us in the book’s second section (where he somewhat clumsily cuts us off from Mariam). The converging stories of these two women are told against the backdrop of an Afghanistan that is lurching from one era of instability to another. The narrative moves between 1974 (the year of Mariam’s wedding) and 2003, a period that includes the military rule of President Daoud Khan, the long years of Soviet occupation, the internecine fighting that turn swathes of the country into a war zone and its civilians into target practice for rocket bombers, and the emergence of the Taliban in the mid-1990s.

Hosseini’s description of life in Kabul over these strife-filled years is as absorbing as it was in his first novel The Kite Runner, which became a huge international success. Some of the flaws of that book are on view here also. The Kite Runner was a near-perfect example of the cosily satisfying, middlebrow work of fiction with appeal for casual readers who wouldn’t ordinarily plough through books about “heavy topics”. The first Afghan novel to be published originally in English, it opened a window to a period and setting most of us knew very little about, and did this in accessible language, and through a page-turner of a plot. However, part of its accessibility to a wide readership came from the fact that it was occasionally manipulative, carefully underlining key sentences for the reader; some of Hosseini’s attempts to extract emotion from the text were embarrassingly transparent.

Some of this persists in A Thousand Splendid Suns. The image of an aged Jalil Khan looking up at Mariam’s window, hoping for a glimpse of the daughter he cast away years ago, would be poignant enough on its own, but Hosseini must elbow-nudge the reader thus: “He’d stood there for hours, waiting for her, now and then calling her name, just as she had once called his name outside his house…their eyes had met briefly through a part in the curtains, as they had met many years earlier through a part in another pair of curtains.” Also, Rasheed is an underdeveloped character (though perhaps that’s the idea) and his skirmishes with his wives seem farcical and over the top; some passages read like the script for an exploitation film about two women and their chauvinistic male tormentor.

Thankfully, such simplifications are fewer here than in The Kite Runner. Much of the power of A Thousand Splendid Suns resides in its small, almost throwaway observations about the nature of relationships, societal and family structures: such as Laila bitterly reflecting that people “shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d given all their love away to the old ones”, and Mariam’s sense that her mother doesn’t want her to find the happiness and freedom she never had herself. This latter idea may seem cynical, but it’s an acute commentary on the ambivalent, complex relationship between many parents and children in conservative societies that are straining for liberalness. (We in India know quite a bit about this phenomenon; witness how older women are often the most strident defenders of traditions that are detrimental to women’s interests. The convenient notion that parents always act purely and unequivocally in their children’s interests masks the many complexities of human behaviour and doesn’t account for the self-interest that all of us carry within us.)

There are other nice vignettes. For instance, when the free-spirited Mariam and Laila are each coerced into wearing a burqa for the first time (many years apart), they are surprised at how secure they feel: given their recent experiences, it’s comforting that people can no longer see their faces, look into their eyes, scrutinize and judge them. I also liked the way Hosseini uses the Pinocchio tale to bookend his novel. The story of the puppet who wants to be a “real boy” has parallels with Mariam and Laila (and other women in this society) being denied human rights and control over their own lives, but it also finds a small echo elsewhere – in Rasheed’s desperate, all-consuming need for a son to replace the one he lost a long time ago, and how this only leads to tragedy.

It’s easy to understand why Hosseini has such a wide readership around the world. In stories like the ones he tells in The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, form usually takes second place to content: even if the writing is patchy or overwrought, most readers are swept along by the sheer emotional sweep of a narrative about people living in constant fear for their lives; of a setting where you step out of your house knowing you might be blown to pieces any moment, and where women have few rights even during the relatively good times.

However, form and content are better balanced in this new novel, which indicates that Hosseini has grown as a writer, learnt something about restraint and about letting a story tell itself.

P.S. Based on conversations with various people, I find it interesting what contrary feelings The Kite Runner evokes among readers. I imagine that a debate on the merits and demerits of this book, conducted between an enthusiast who was moved to tears and a critic who thought it shallow and contrived, would lead absolutely nowhere since the two people concerned would be occupying entirely different planes on the reading experience. The first might accuse the second of being pedantic, “too critical”, or perhaps even insensitive to human tragedies in Afghanistan; the second would probably have to resort to snobbery and suggest that the first expand the scope of his reading in order to discover how an author can convey genuine emotion.

As usual, I’m on the fence. My gut reaction was an uneasiness about parts of the book ringing false, and this is certainly problematic when serious topics are being dealt with (I’ve felt similarly about films like Matrubhoomi and Provoked). But I didn’t think it was at all bad for a first-time novelist trying to tell a very circumscribed story to a global readership. And of course there are the usual points about writing that can hold the attention of the casual reader, perhaps serve as a stepping stone for him to move to better things (or not, for that matter).

Dogs beating summer at the Delhi Gymkhana

or; the imperious Olivier as Marcus Licinius Crassus and Tony Curtis as his luscious young body-servant in the bathing scene from Spartacus


(Click to enlarge. Photo by Abhilasha)

Hospital adventures - 2

The family experienced collective PMS (Prime Minister-induced Stress) on another of our recent stays in Apollo Hospital. It turned out that former prime ministers V P Singh and Chandrashekhar were both being treated on the floor above ours, which naturally meant that not a single senior doctor was available to any of the other patients for hours on end. This lack of attention was most annoying to my ailing-but-still doughty grandmother, who hadn’t been too keen to go to the hospital in the first place. By the time a cocker spaniel-expressioned young attendant came into the room to check on her, she was more than ready to break a few heads.

Attendant: Kaise hain, maa-ji?
Nani (in sweetest sweet-old-lady tone): Beta, ek baat batao. I hear V P Singh ji and Chandrashekhar ji are on the floor above?
Attendant: Yes maa-ji. They are being treated.
Nani (unsheathing claws): Can you please give them a message? Tell them after their treatment is over, Indira Gandhi is here, waiting to give them lessons in politics.

(Exeunt attendant and nurses, uncertain half-smiles frozen on faces)

But the attendent got his own back later, when he came to inform us that the stretcher was ready to transport her to the ambulance, for the drive back home:

Nani (uncomfortable, impatient to get home, and repeating herself in her panic): Beta, is the ambulance here?
Attendant: Yes maa-ji, it’s arrived.
Nani: Are you sure? Last time they took me down too soon and I had to wait a long time before an ambulance was free.
Attendant: Don’t worry, I saw it with my own eyes, it's right there.
Nani: But where is it? Where? Where?
Attendant: Maa-ji, it’s downstairs. If I could bring it to the room I would, but this is the fifth floor and the lift isn’t big enough.

Nadal's blog

They face each other in a French Open quarter-final later today, but first Rafael Nadal makes Carlos Moya do “10 trunk flexions” in a posh Paris restaurant, with diners looking on in merriment. And all because of a Playstation game. Read about it on Rafa’s ATP blog, where you’ll also discover that our brutish Spaniard hero is a shy little boy inside (see the entry about his 21st birthday celebrations and not liking the journalists and cameras around because it felt too artificial).

Notes on Craig Thompson's Blankets

Just had to pick up Craig Thompson’s graphic novel Blankets when I saw it at Full Circle in Greater Kailash. I have it on DVD, but it’s difficult to read a big book for the first time on a computer screen (tactile experience, convenience, etc). Haven't regretted it. This is a gentle, elegiac, beautifully illustrated work, well worth investing time and money into.

A semi-autobiographical story, Blankets moves between two phases of the narrator Craig’s life: his childhood days, sharing (and squabbling over) a single bed with his kid brother Phil; and his years as a confused adolescent, finding some comfort in an intense but fragile relationship with a girl named Raina. Through all this, Craig struggles with questions about religion, art, the ephemeral nature of our existence on earth (and whether it will be followed by something more rewarding), the importance of family and the difficulty of achieving genuine closeness with another person. A loner, he feels dissociated from most people around him and struggles in vain to stay rooted to something. Growing up in a staunchly Christian family, taught at Sunday school that God can properly be worshipped only by singing His praises, not by drawing pictures, he becomes concerned that his passion for drawing might amount to blasphemy; he burns all his artwork, but this doesn’t bring him the peace of mind he was hoping for.


According to the Wikipedia entry on Craig Thompson, the idea for Blankets came out of his wanting “to describe how it feels to sleep next to someone for the first time”. This idea – seeking comfort, however fleetingly, in someone else’s physical presence – runs through the book: initially Craig and Phil resent having to share a small bed, but when they are finally put in separate rooms they quickly find excuses to get back together. Craig and Raina’s relationship is marked by their finding ways to spend the night together, or just to lie down next to each other (even before their relationship becomes sexual). Blankets are integral to the story too – the brothers fight over them in winter and push them away in the muggy Wisconsin summers, and later, Raina gifts Craig a richly patterned quilt she made herself, which becomes a symbol of the bond between them.

There are many things to say about this detailed book – for instance, I could observe that the overused phrase “deceptively simple” is an apt description of it. Despite frequently cutting between the past and present, the narrative is straightforward, in traditional story-book style. And though many of the drawings are outstanding studies in characters’ expressions and little pauses in conversations, the storyboarding is not especially experimental; Blankets doesn’t demand the rigorous concentration that one needs while reading a graphic novel conceptualised by, say, Alan Moore – where many different layers of meaning often coexist within a single panel. But this is no simple picture-book either. Look at the drawings more closely (preferably after having read the book once, so that the plot is no longer in the way) and you’ll appreciate how effectively they depict Craig’s interior life, his sense of isolation.

The artwork is often quite complex in terms of prefiguring, in the way the characters are positioned in relation to each other, and the visual connections between panels. Small example: two panels, 450 pages apart, show Craig entering the house, saying “Hey, Phil” to his brother and eliciting a lazy “Hey” in response. In the first of these panels, they are children and Phil is reclining on the couch watching Tom and Jerry; in the second, they are young men, with Phil again absorbed by the TV, but playing on his Playstation this time. The two panels contain shared associations – this is the same house where the brothers grew up, and the same room, many years apart – but also indicate how much their relationship has changed over time (Craig and Phil are so much a part of each others’ lives in the childhood sections that it comes as a shock when, after a few chapters that focus on the adult Craig’s relationship with Raina, we see the grown-up Phil and realise that the siblings are now aloof, brooding teens, speaking in monosyllables to each other).

The child's perspective

Thompson’s depiction of the hegemony of adults, and how threatening the world can be for sensitive children, reminded me of one of my favourite books from last year, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (a related post here). Mitchell’s novel, about a year in the life of a young boy, Jason, growing up in an English village in the early 1980s, drew some criticism for being too simple, and a “throwback” from the complex narrative techniques he employed in his earlier books. But there was a lot going on under its placid surface: each chapter, written in a subtly different style from the others, was a vivid portrayal of a child’s inner life and the story, coloured as it was by Jason’s fantasies, couldn’t always be taken at face value.

Blankets has a similar effect in places. I liked Thompson’s evocation of the magic that exists in a child’s world, which adults turn into something mundane (Craig and Phil are excited by the sparks of light – fairies? Tinkerbell? – they see in their room late at night, but their parents coolly inform them that it’s merely static electricity). And early on, when the boys’ father punishes them by making little Phil spend the night in a dreaded hidden room called the “cubby hole”, he is depicted as an imposing, outsize authority figure. When Mr Thompson snaps open the elastic bed in this room, the image is a surreal one straight out of the boys’ nightmares: there are demons lurking in the cubby hole’s dark corners and the bed takes the form of a primeval monster, jaws agape, waiting to sink its giant teeth into poor Phil.


Of course, when we see Craig and Phil’s parents much later in the book, they don’t seem threatening anymore; we understand that they aren’t the fiends (or even the apathetic slouches) that the early chapters suggested, just simple, conservative folk making the best of difficult circumstances. But the cubby-hole image is powerful enough for us to appreciate how Craig's life has been coloured by these early experiences.

More panels from the book (click to enlarge):

P.S. Thompson's official website is here.

Dead letter office

Through Mitali Saran’s weekly column Stet, I discover a source of much fine comedy: the reader email on the website Death Clock. For the uninitiated, Death Clock, which calls itself the “Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away”, tells you the exact date on which you’re going to die, based on basic personal details (age, weight, body mass index and suchlike) and depending on what “mode (normal/pessimistic/sadistic) you select.

Needless to say, some people have taken this morbid little game very, very seriously and sent dollops of hate-mail to the site’s creator. Also needless to say, among the funniest are the ones written by the Rabid Religious. Some of my favourites (typos/spelling mistakes retained from original):

Playing with peoples lives is not a joke. You're trying to gods job. It frightens me that there is someone out there that considers death a joke. I do feel sorry for you though. Seeing as how on judgement day you will have to stand in front of the lord knowing that you have made a mochary of his job.

and

And yeah, just for your information, only God in heaven can decide when we will die and how long we will live. And there is no need to scare people off like this!

See, that’s one of the great things about religion – it turns people into self-righteous, humourless blobs of fulminating mucus, which means loads of fun for the rest of us, the Walking Damned.

I also love this one:

We came across your Death Clock web site via our 15 year old daughter and we are very unhappy that you are disturbing her and her friends. In their eyes you are propagating the truth about their own mortality which is making them anxious.

Enjoy the archives.