Chronicling one's own existence and the endless meanderings thereof are a time-tested method of taming one's inner voyeur.
This space has been lying idle for quite a while now, and on a stormy evening, this is all I can come up with by way of explanation for its recall.
The past few months have been eventful enough, not the least because I re-discovered the delights of writing old-school, scribbling away in quiet nooks and crannies, watching everything, speaking nothing. But why the voyeur? Is a writer simply a very dignified onlooker, seeking his jollies in the vagaries and the foibles of those around him? This question actually signalled a very significant shift in the literary mores of the past century, when the writer learnt that detachment from the world he created around him was simply not gonna cut it, and the world was as much a product of the act of his watching it, as his own perception. And it most certainly has signalled a shift in my own thought process.
The past few months has produced four fragments, which are still not the way I envisioned them to be inside my head.. but I have been told they do not suck too badly. Let's hope I find the drive to publish them here, soon...
Although there have been several books in the past few months which have captured my imagination, like Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News" , Haruki Murakami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World", "Bluebeard's Egg" by Margaret Atwood, "Herzog" by Saul Bellow, "Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov, "A Mercy" by Toni Morrison... the ones leaving the deepest imprint were "Oblivion" and "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men", both short-story collections by the scaringly brilliant David Foster Wallace, whose tragic suicide at 46, left the literary community heartbroken in late 2008. The latter was recently adapted for the screen by John Krasinski, and was a big hit at the Sundance film festival. I cannot recommend the book, as well as the movie(of the same name) highly enough.
