Category: literature

  • 35mm person

    I enjoy being boring in some ways. The love for analogue things has been ingrained in me in that kind of “boringness”. I like leather notebooks, I like fountain pens. I love the feel of clicking download on a WeTransfer link that my local photography shop sends me to unwrap the godawful photographs that I took on vacation without thinking of much. The most recent purchases of mine that have been purely towards my own entertainment is a steady stream of film cameras and film stock. And the older I become, the more tied to 35mm film and fountain pens my habits become.

    This September, I traveled to northern Spain and clicked three film rolls worth of photos. Since we are talking about half frame photographs, that is 72 x 3 = 216 photos (!). The wealth of this is an unparalleled riches of photos for me.

    I have started posting more on karma.kodak with more of those experiments. Most of them go out to a select audience of 2 or 3 of my friends. But it makes me LARP as a 35mm person and that is all one needs on some days.

  • Summer Malaise

    There is a kind of lethargy that is only prevalent amongst people who are belong to the academic space. Some of us experience this lethargy in the temporary form—the post-examination lull, the post-semester emptiness etc. For some of us who have existed in this sphere for a while, the summer malaise is something that is a constant. I have felt, for the last nine years at least, that I should be doing more during summer and yet, every summer passes without much of a dent on my reading list.

    Perhaps this is only heightened by the lull that the end of an era makes you feel. Since I defended my thesis in the beginning of summer, I have gone into phases of complete tiredness and complete euphoria. For the first time in years, I told a few friends, I have no exam in sight. And for the first time, this summer malaise is an eternity of tediousness.

    Not that I am not doing things: I have been grading, working on projects, and writing (a bit) but this has been a kind of summer where I have spent most of my time wondering if this is the peak of adulthood: this portioning of time where I am not sure of the value of time that I am keeping for reading, writing, etc. The external validation of semester grades and exams that has regulated time for me for so long (since 1996, to be exact) has ceased and I am here: reading the news, getting all kinds of insurance, and trying to see the rates of insurance and investments. This summer malaise has an recuperative effect usually. But this time, it has seemed like a different thing. An unending horizon of time which, both limited and daunting in its unendedness, is the canvas of the every day.

  • A Post-Dissertation Reading List

    This is a reading list that I kept building for some reason as I kept writing my dissertation towards an end… But here it goes:

    • After by Vivek Narayanan
    • Affinities by Brian Dillon
    • Baburnama by Babur
    • Twilight in Delhi by Ahmad Ali
    • Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck
    • The Sixty Five Years of Washington by Juan José Saer
    • An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky
    • Tamas by Bhisham Sahani
    • Chinatown by Thuận
  • Summer Reading

    Summer Reading

    One of the few things that I have avoided for a long period of time is directing my own reading. For years now, a book or a writer falls into my line of vision because I am incapable of shaking off an impression it has made upon me. Hence, summer reading lists have seemed an artificial thing that people put upon themselves. It is only as I prepare to move between apartments, write a dissertation, and enter the last year of my dissertation that the artificial constructed nature of this reading list seems like a beautiful refuge of kind. It also serves another purpose, I cannot have every single book with me as I move apartments and to have a kind of direction is, in fact, the kind of construct that I need. And without further ado, here is my reading list:

    The books that I have chosen here are all books that I have been meaning to read for a while. What I hope is that this summer I manage to write/think about them as I make my way through this pile. The list includes:

    The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod
    The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić
    The Anomaly     by Hervé Le Tellier
    Doppelgänger     by Daša Drndić
    The New Moscow Philosophy     by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh
    The Undercurrents     by Kirsty Bell
    Berlin, September 20     by Boaz Levin
    Free Jazz Communism     from Rab-Rab Press
    The Copenhagen Trilogy     by Tove Ditlevsen
    The Illogic of Kassel     by Enrique Vila-Matas

  • Visceral Gestures: Writing Susumu Kamijo’s Art

    Some months ago, in a haze of art talk and chats about Samuel Beckett and Kobo Abe, I told Susumu Kamijo that I would love to write about his art. It was an impulsive thing to say, considering that I have never written about any art that I have loved or hated. Usually the marginalia of my notebooks, littered with thoughts about Ivan Kožarić’s (radical) ideas regarding public space and how Francis Bacon lights upon a dark background, is just that—thoughts that remain somewhere unwritten in sentences. They are reduced to ideas I want to pursue but do not. They are my private consumption habits about art and the artists. My strange forays into rabbit holes that make me look up strange art movements and its off-shoots.

    With Susumu Kamijo’s art, the thing that attracted me is the apparent lightness of it. It still seems to me like it is an elaborate and large-scale trick where everyone is only pretending that his poodle paintings are fluffy and cute, when it seems so much clearer that there is something sinister that is revealed to a lay consumer of art when the poodle forms starts becoming something else.

    Most of my writing came down to decoding the “something else” part of that. And after quite a few drafts and a few chats with the artist, the press release was published online when they announced the solo show for Perrotin’s Seoul gallery.