2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.



Here's an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 22,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Sci-fi soul

Science fiction is a higher exploration. If, for a moment, you'd be willing to forget that it's the product of scientific notions and fantastic depictions, what you'll see is nothing less than the ultimate expression: good writing, good thinking, good creating and good exploring. There's an unfortunate conception associated with sci-fi, that its readers are geeks, that he who enjoys science fiction will also enjoy fiddling with computers, toying with codes, and so on; the fact of the matter is, however, that it's not false.

In the beginning, such impressions could've easily been false considering sci-fi didn't originate in esoteric laboratories and into cult-hungry groups of people but simply out of the discovery of possibilities (as is the case with everything). In the beginning, sci-fi was but literature's response to mankind's entry into the Information Age. When the free distribution of and access to information transcended cultural and social boundaries that were till that moment pertinent as information barriers, when the technology became available to speculate on the possibilities of the future with that kind of information, science fiction was born.

[caption id="attachment_20793" align="aligncenter" width="270" caption="Philip K. Dick's 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale' was adapted for the silver screen as 'Total Recall'. The story is a good example of all that's sci-fi, including the psychological effects of false memories (something that could get lost in the technicalities of normal fiction)."][/caption]

It was rooted in the ability to shrink distances, to expand those horizons in the ambit of which foreign agents of influence existed, to reach out farther and beyond charted territories to evangelize the human condition across the universe. I don't want to list works now not because I suck at remembering what I've read but because it doesn't matter what "kind" of science fiction has been read: it's the sci-fi soul that matters. Like all works of literature, sci-fi labours under the onus of repairing the bad and basks in the glory of preserving the good, and even then, things are very subjective.

For instance, even Asimov and Clarke are leagues apart despite both being greats: Asimov is a philosopher, a man given to technique and process, whose worlds are ripe with intent and purpose, a world where ends justify means, whereas Clarke is a dreamer, a creator of worlds that don't seek to precipitate order out of chaos but art, whose characters revel not just in humanism but existentialism. In fact, such leagues span the differences between the likes of Verne, Gernsback, DNA, Stapledon, Aldiss, PKD, Vonnegut, Le Guin, Pohl, Herbert and Niven.

[caption id="attachment_20792" align="aligncenter" width="529" caption="Larry Niven's 'Ringworld' was situated on a massive ring that encircled a star, the light from which was periodically blocked by an intervening ring to give rise to night and day."][/caption]

The sci-fi soul will not regret reading any of them irrespective of whether it thought they were good or bad because it exists in a world filled with more variables than equations, and any shortcomings it thinks it sees are essentially a paucity of its own imagination. Because you've lived on Planet Earth, because you've lived for quite some time in a house that had trees around it, because you know that they're so commonplace and how they are what they are, there's not much you can dispute about a leaf. On the other hand, what are the chances that all sci-fi readers would've interpreted Pandora from Avatar similarly were it a book? You'll agree the chances are less than slim.

To the sci-fi soul, reading sci-fi is a process of self-discovery, a rudimentary rite of passage through which it attempts to understand the working of a universe that is conducive to human consciousness, an initiation into a realm beyond the vestiges of laws and forces where absolutely nothing is impossible. There are no leaves to define green, there are only exploding stars and drifting clouds of intergalactic dust from which beryl, aquamarine and chartreuse must be strained, must be purchased at some cost other than that of droll sight.

Science fiction, by mandating utmost obedience to its doctrine of freestyle, is the ultimate rebellion: it is where stagnation and mediocrity are interred in their crypts, where even convenient innovations are put to the test of participation. The sci-fi soul is what it is because sci-fi is what it is - an open forum to conceive, appellate, repair and conclude, a court of dialectics adjudicated by the scientific method.

Le mot juste

"You could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string" reads an inspection of the conundrum of interpretation in Flaubert's Parrot (1984). A similar thing can be done with a biography of Julian Barnes: let the trawling net fill, then haul it in, sort, throw back, store, fillet and sell. Yet consider what isn't caught: there is always far more of Barnes that slips through.

For those who have read any of Barnes's books, be it the distressing tripartite England, England or the intensively fictionalized account of the Great Wyrley Outrage, Arthur and George, those stark metaphors stand out that were strung taut around unforgiving sentences, assuaging those waylaid in their attempt to move on from tragedies that innocence cannot be reinvented. In fact, since it would be an injustice to concede that very little is known of the man, it would be just as right to come to the conclusion that almost everything about him is reflected in his writing.

Born in Leicester, England, in 1946, Barnes studied modern languages at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with honours in 1968. After graduation, he was employed with the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement as a lexicographer, before joining the New Statesman and the New Review as a reviewer and literary editor in 1977. It was in this position that he wrote his first novel, Metroland, in 1981, winning the Somerset Maugham Prize for it. It was in this position that he wrote his third novel in 1984, his claim to international fame, Flaubert's Parrot. An ardent Francophile, he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004 in recognition of his work.

A rather English man in many ways, Barnes is discursive and understated, freely suspended on a forest of associations that stretch between his love for the Gaelic all the way to a humaneness and generosity that some of his friends recollect passionately. Hardly ever blunt in his appraisal of matters - literary or no - his association with the art seems to suggest less of experimentation and more of groping. Given his candidness, those who have known him in any measure are only inclined to believe he knows just as much as the reader does. In other words, his books enjoy such acclaim because Barnes seems to have written each word the moment the reader has read those words. They come to life reflected starkly in the memories of our own past, of what we have always held to be true but at the moment of completion of Barnes' exposition seem to be trapped in a simulacrum.

The inherent variety of his styles points at the inability of readers to consolidate his work under one ideological umbrella; given that the days of British literature are waning, it becomes all the more pertinent to understand this most inscrutable of authors. Readers knew what to expect from Rushdie, from Amis, but they stand clueless when it comes to Barnes, a man Auberon Waugh, founder of The Literary Review, said wouldn't be read in 20 years' time in 1991. There have been no attempts at self-portraits, no attempts to emulate Pynchon's or Conan Doyle's portrayal of fiction as the higher autobiography. Does the man know how to invent, then?

One thing is for sure, however. Where, in search of the right word, Flaubert and Nabokov toe the fine line between indulgent romanticism and an ironic realism, Julian Barnes deftly negotiates the pursuit of le mot juste, as it were, to construct the lives and times of his fiercely individual characters, each still possessing sufficient strength to entice the reader into examining the tenuous links between one's past and future. The works of Barnes, more than anything else, are a study of history and our places in them. It has been said that other people's tastes in art can seem as mysterious and trivial as their tastes in love, and in reading a man who writes with such verbal inventiveness, our lifetimes seem to split asunder, each shard a mirror of our disbelief, a mysterious souvenir to remember our vain pursuit of the days gone by.

When a certain sphere paid a visit

On September 27, 2011, when an innocuous neutrino started its short journey from the Large Hadron Collider in CERN on the Franco-Swiss border, the world rested comfortably on the shoulders of a certain Albert Einstein. The Universe tottered on the verge of becoming completely explicable, string theorists were retreating into the shadows whence they had come, and particle physicists did what they always have done: relax and wait for more results to prove them more right.

That neutrino proved them wrong. Even though all it did was beat a ray of light by 60 nanoseconds, it had managed to defy a lifetime’s work in physics by a physicist everyone considered the greatest of all time. By travelling faster than light, it had utterly disproved the monumental theory of relativity. Suddenly, things began to turn around: the Universe was suddenly shrouded in mystery, the space-time continuum was being re-examined, particle physicists began to doubt their education… and the string theorist was suddenly in the limelight.

What does this have to do with a book on Victorian sociology? Almost everything. Rewind back to 1884, when the schoolmaster of the small Philological School in Marylebone, Edwin Abbott Abbott, published a novella called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. The book was about a fictitious world inhabited by two-dimensional people, rather two-dimensional shapes that represented people: women were straight lines and men were polygons. It was a satire that mocked the Victorian way of life. Women were line-segments and therefore essentially one-dimensional, as was reflected by the limited roles they were allowed to play in the society. Men, on the other hand, had many sides to them, and therefore dominated the two-dimensional world.

[caption id="attachment_20765" align="aligncenter" width="370" caption="Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 1884"][/caption]

When, one day, a nameless sphere decides to pay a visit to the narrator, a humble square, it is unable to convince him of the existence of the third dimension. However, after the square is chosen as an apostle to taken to Spaceland, the three-dimensional world, he is convinced that solids exist. Upon his return, again, he is condemned in Flatland as a madman and nobody is inclined to take him seriously.

The book is a powerful allegory in that it describes with an oft-sardonic mathematical simplicity the plight of those who perpetuate prejudices and yet suffer from the prejudice of others. The plot itself is linear, unassuming and provides the reader with no distractions but only the thrill of a Kafkaesque fantasy. The nameless sphere and his divine visitations, the humble square and his naïve suppositions, even the monarch of Pointland and his solipsistic musings – all touch close to the everyman’s experiences.

In fact, were Flatland to be mired in reality at the outset by the author himself, the book would long have lost its charmingly experimental texture, condemned to spend its life like its narrator did. No; in being the only known work of mathematical fiction, the book has managed to survive more than a century of tireless scrutiny by portraying itself as an examination of dimensions and nothing more.

While Abbott himself could not have imagined its scope when he wrote it, the morals of Flatland were soon found to be applicable in a variety of settings, including those of the string theorist. Imagine his plight as he attempted desperately to convince his colleagues of the existence of 10, 18, even 23 dimensions, but failed miserably each time. Imagine, then, his exclamation when a certain sphere paid the particle physicists a visit.

It is not known whether Abbott was writing as a historian or as a misogynist: both roles become evident in the literature as the realm’s women, being lines, have to survive many ignominies, some metaphorical, some plainly derisive, to coexist with the freer men. However, such analyses can today safely be sidelined: Abbott’s views on feminism are hardly considered as such, whereas his prophetic insight into the role of time as a fourth dimension was considered by Einstein himself to be an inspiration. And to think the book that spelled the rise of the particle physicist also has come to spell the rise of the string theorist!