but before that... a movie review (and how It's a Sign)!

So I just finished watching Everything is Illuminated. Yes, watching. It is also a movie. And uh well, not just-just (I'm not that vela). It's been, err... almost an hour. Was it good? Hmm, the answer to that would be, when The Hubby tried to communicate with me 10 mins towards the end of the movie (he called at 15 mins-to-end, asking if I want dinner and was told something to the effect of 'I'm not in, call you back later'), by physically barging into room and making noise about how movies on DVD can be paused, I just looked at him and wailed in most distressed housewife tone, 'You know I hate it when you do that' and then mentioned the hurtful hitherto un-uttereds: You Go Eat, I Am Not Coming.

So it's that nice, the movie. Worth a spat with husband after you've done exactly what he dislikes the most (like, make him feel like he doesn't exist, because a perfectly pause-able movie is on). I still haven't read the book though, mainly because a) I know of it only through First City colleagues who read it and seemed bewildered for a lifetime, and kinda totally salivating everytime Jonathan Safran Foer was mentioned aloud (as if he wrote the Kama Sutra or something). Clearly, I don't think I can deal with that state at the mo, also because b) I just finished a traumatic cinema studies course on Trauma and History and anything with the words Nazi, Germany produce the most vile and sexy repulsion-attraction urges in me (like 'It's Worth It' meets 'I Can't Take it Anymore'). So just to spare myself the pleaurable torment of such complicated things, I put the book back on the shelf (despite the enticing, hypnotic, swirling words in red and white) with a sigh and ran my nazar around for something bubblegummy pink.

So back to movie, yes. I'm sure it's a superbly simplified version of the book (any author who names his main protagonist after himself clearly has a lot more showmanship up his sleeve), but it works brilliantly nevertheless. I loved it because it was so apt for the situation I find myself in these days, increasingly so. The reason why I am writing this blog again. The reason I am wondering, again, what it means to be a writer. The reason we all want to write books, make movies, tell stories. Because we want to remember. And by doing that, we hope someone will remember. So here is a protaonist, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jewish, American, a "collector", not a writer, he insists. And he has this obsession with preserving memories. But there is this problem of memories being so very ephemeral, hard to catch like a butterfly, and harder to pin wriggling, on a wall. So Jonathan preserves objects from that moment, zipped neatly in plastic pouches, like a forensic scientist would: photographs, mud, dentures, pebbles, ash, among other oddities. He frames the pictures of his loved ones on his wall, and pins their memories in plastic pouches on the wall underneath. His room is full of hundreds of such mementos; only under his grandfather's name (which is also his name, coinicidentally), there is a single memory - an amber pendant with a grasshoper-ish insect preserved in it. And then he receives another memento, a photograph of his grandfather and a young woman, from his dying grandmother.

And that is when he decides to chase a memory. Not his own memory, but his grandfather's. Because that's what gives us identity, no? When we know our past, our memories, and the memories that led to us. Next thing he knows, Jonathan is in Ukraine, being escorted from Odessa to a place called Trachimbrod, which no one remembers (hell even I couldn't; had to Google it just now). His guides are the young MJ-loving, 'Negro'-digging, hip-hop-shakin' translator Alex Perchov; his rude, snappy, Jew-hating senile grandfather who claims he is blind but can drive them around; and his Official Seeing-Eye bitch Sammy Davis Jr Jr, who is in one word, mad.

In one sense, this is a road movie, a mad one (like they all are). A bunch of mismatched men, a dog, a battered car, a neverending road because their destination has, literally, fallen off the map. And therein lies a rite of passage, a search for identity, a journey into knowing, for all of them (hell, even the dog, yes). But Trachimbrod is not mythical; it is a real place that was erased into mythopeia at the time of the Second World War. It exists, as they all find out, after all these years, as an assortment of memories, with another collector, who lives in a cottage in the middle of a neverending sunflower field.

What a beautiful string of metaphors (even if it fits every essay in my fat Trauma and Memory film reader from the course)! Don't we all, live in each others' memories? Don't we all want to be loved because it means someone has preserved a part of us - this real, almost as real as physical part of us - in his or her gaze, memory, perception? Don't we all fret and worry about shifting memories? Don't we all want to pin them down, 'whittle them down', into something more manageable in size, to paraphrase Susan Orlean in Adaptation? Isn't that why we collect shoebox-fulls of photos, letters, lost earrings, post-its, doodles and toilet paper poetry? Just 'In case', as one of the Trachimbrod collector's folder labels says. In case someone comes along and chooses to take over our shoeboxes of memories, to preserve them, and us - a semblance of them all, at any rate - and carry us over into the future, into afterlife as something less than a wispy ghost. In case someone comes to exist, because of our memories. Because a shoebox full of memories is a moment that lets you play god. As the Trachimbrod collector says, "No, it does not exist for you. You exist for it. You have come because it exists."

And then there is language, how it's never enough, but how it is unendingly interpretative. Like the souvenier in the plastic pouch. How all language is "inside out" to quote Jonathan (and later, Alex). Words are how we wear our insides on the outside, and keep the outside facing inside. How it allows, for all of us, to spell memories so that we can not just look back, or hope forward, but stay alongside. As Alex says, before he finishes writing the book that is made into the novel that is made into the movie,

...that everything is illuminated in the light of the past.

It is always along the side of us...

...on the inside, looking out.

Like you say, inside out.

Jonfen, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life.

And you will always be along the side of mine.

Staying alongside. Two words. And such crushing longing and tragedy therein.

And of course, if the words don't haunt you, the music floors. An OST that's as much a movie as the movie it gives company to. And as strangely quirkily enjoyable despite the grimness under the surface, as the movie is. Forgive me for my un-musicy ways, but it's just a lovely collection of tunes by Paul Cantelon that sound like something very familiar (hence must be some genre, like dunno, salsa?) but also very new (so maybe alt cool genre like Ukrainian blues?). It is beautiful and evocative and happy and sad and makes you wanna dance while sitting and things like that. I can't think of any possible situation in which I would be able to choose between the two songs (no words still qualifies as song, I guess?) I liked best:

Odessa melody

and

Dikiy Muzhchina - Leningrad

(hey, your choice doesn't count unless you've seen the movie moments when these come in.)

So it's a watch, yes. Because it's simple and brutal. (And am into such stuff these days.) It makes me want to read a book I was too scared to pick up because I thought it would leave me feeling raw and vulnerable (I was "distressed", as Alex would say). And I will never be able to look at mementos and sunflowers the same way again, because I saw them cloned on a wall and a field in this film, and really saw them like I never did. Despite my goldfish memory, and my I-Will-Forget-and-be-Forgotten anxieties, those are two images that will always make me say, 'how can I forget?'

Punky PJ's brand new What I'd Steal From Whom series

I've frittered away a major part of my waking time, coffee-paid-rumination time, unlawfully-misused-job-time, precious-staring-into-space time wondering if I'll ever become a writer. I've let this angsty question mark gnaw away at that 2 percentile working area of my brain, wallow in the surplus bile my life can produce in alarmingly huge quantities without notice, jump up and down and dance around them heart valves as I interview a good author, read a fantastic book, watch a superlative movie, or chip away at a blogpost that seems like something worth reading after all.


Thing is, I'm sick of wondering whether I'm an original. I mean, how many times can you read a heartbreakingly lifefuckingly awesome line/ passage in a book and go, 'shit, everything's already been said. (And so well.)' How many times can I shut a book and hug it to my chest because it has expanded and broken my heart all at the same time; because it's cast my life in beautiful ever-blooming words while at the same time, showing me how banal my own words for it are? How many times can I angst over a semi-colon, and not think 'you'd better justify this OCD by becoming a writer, bitch'. And how long can I stick by my tough, lonely, waiting-for-Godot decision to wait for a story to find me?


Thing is, I don't know if I can ever not do everything I did in the last para. I don't know if I can quit waiting, and I don't know if I can go on. But I can make purgatory a tad more interesting. I can bide my time by doing some 'prep', as they call it in MBA land (and Malory Towers). I can do a thorough survey of all the books I am reading and loving every bit of, and put my finger on every goddamn heartbreaking thing in it that's making me dizzy and sick with sweet-sad love for the world. That way, I can a) find a cure for my nasty talent for not remembering all the worthwhile things (and remembering all kinds of trivialities, such as page number of gorgeous line in book, rather than line itself), and b) have a good archive of readymade solutions, a problem-solving oracle of sorts, for the time when I do start writing the Story that finds me, and find that it is joined at the hip to my old enemy called Writer's Block.


So from next post, Punky PJs lists her top n list of What She'd Steal from Whom. Which means a post talking about each of the books she's either in the afterglow of (just finished reading), or can forever ruminate on the afterglow of (like Sacred Games, ohdon'tgetmestarted), or is beginning to foresee afterglow of (TBA). So that c) you can get her rant and your bookstore-browsing reco needs fufilled, all at once.


Beginning with Omar Ahmad's The Storyteller's Tale, a gorgeous novella that was read in airport surroundings and hence will always have a mysterious in-betweenness-of-worlds recall...

Fiction: My Great Escape, Writing: My Sweet Torment

You know, that famous line that goes Books Are Your Best Friends? Never quite got that one. My books have never been my best friends. Hell, no. I can never say I even know my favourite books. I can't even say I have favourite books; just books that refuse to leave me. Is that an apt description for a best friend? Dunno.

I think my books, they've left me with fleeting but intense moments, like intimate conversations with strangers on busrides. Touch and go, but stay in memories. Revisit, as deja vu, as glitch in my Matrix-syncd world. Morph and mutate, like the creature who lives inside the splinter in my brain.

There've been episodes when books have saved me from murdering people; there've been moments when they've plunged my PMS-y mood down-down-down with malicious delight; there've been so many passages that've made me love like I have never loved (and maybe can't possibly) in the life outside the covers of a book. But the ones I love the most are the moments when the tangible world wrapped around me as I hold a book in my hands and read, melts and dissolves and expands a wee bit, because something I've just read has sent warm and fuzzy feelings from labrynthine brain depths to goose pimple surfaces. I could be anywhere: propped against a pillow/ feet tucked under the bum, into the razai/ knees hugged to chest/ lying on tummy/ miss-slutty-legs-on-the-desk. But I'd be a swirling wobbly bubble for a bit: my eyes wide, ears cottonwoolly, the back of my throat aching with strange, crazy desire. That's my high from reading. Like being in love for the first time (now if only I could remember what that was like when it happened in real life).

It's also my great escape, when I need to shut the book and face life. I've often cheated myself and resorted to the axiom that the best way to deal with people is to watch them as if they're fictional characters. It makes you suddenly indulgent, interested in background histories, and hesitant to judge - the three things you could hardly bring yourself to be interested in otherwise. There's that meditative quality of feeling once-removed from yourself, and so you can have any number of conversations with that person without letting him get under your skin. And to think you don't need to walk away with the perverse pleasure of knowing that your characters have no idea of what you've done to them; I can just sit right there and revel in the cruelty.

I guess that's what I love about fiction. It's by definition, non-documentary, construed, artificial, but it lets me be myself, warts and all. I can be selfish. I can say I want, I want, endlessly. I can make some really idiotic, all-wrong choices. I can be a quicksand madness of narcissistic delight. I can be... oh well, I can assume that I can be.

But when I have to write, and I live with this even as I type, I'm not so sure anymore. Every word is like taking a raging bull by the horns. I move this way and that, dig my heels in and not let the word toss me about. I struggle to remember, to remember what I said aloud in my head before I sat down to type. And till the very last day that I read my writings, I will be in this very moment, tweaking and tinkering and tearing my hair apart about how the right words aren't falling into the right place. And always getting a vaccuum tummy, a niggling sinking feeling that I'm nowhere to be found amidst these words. Nowhere in totality. No epiphanic glimpse. Only fragments I know too well from life anyway.

In writing, I have no escape. Not even when it's fiction I write. It's still pleasurable torment, this wrestling with making-and-becoming. But sometimes I wish it wasn't so unceasing. Or that I would get tired someday I decide to just stop writing. Or that I will someday wholeheartedly start loving this mad process like a sado-masochistic lunatic.

Till then, there's this space between reading and writing, dreaming and waking. I think, for the moment, I call it life.