Of dying and being dead

Just read a NYT Sunday Book Review by Garrison Keilor of Julian Barnes's recent book Nothing To Be Frightened Of.

“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him,” the book begins. Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, has decided at the age of 62 to address his fear of death — why should an agnostic fear death who has no faith in an afterlife? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter.

As an agnostic myself, I think some day I will be in a similar position. For now, I muse about Death and my own mortality in the shadows of the grief of my own experience with it this year vis-a-vis my father's death earlier this year. His death made me more acutely aware not merely of my own mortality but also of path till that door is finally shut some day.

Or in Barnes's words:

For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever -- including the jug -- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave.

The Dying Gaul, of which Lord Byron wrote:

He leans upon his hand—his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his drooped head sinks gradually low—
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one...
- Childe Harold, Canto IV (1818), stanzas 140-141.

So, what does it mean to die? What does it entail for those of us who do not believe in an afterlife? These are not questions that are as overwhelming as the 'What is the meaning of life' angst that 20-something year olds ponder about (sometimes!) but is as unanswerable as we muse over it in our late 30s (me) or early 60s (like Barnes.)

Related:

1) The book, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

2) Aubade a beautiful poem about mortality and death by Philip Larkin (from which I took the title of this post):

..
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare.
..

Kinda related:
a) A short story called Revolving Door by T. C. Forrester that I ran into this morning. (PDF at the bottom of the link has the story. The link itself is to an interview with the author.)
b) Julian Barnes had a short story, East Wind, in the New Yorker earlier this year.

I'm a Man - Muddy Waters

As promised, Muddy Waters with Clapton, in a live performance of I'm a man in 1976.

~*~

And Eric Clapton with Muddy Waters again, this one is a live performance from 1978, with Standing Around Crying.

~*~

Here's what Clapton had to say about Muddy Waters in a recent documentary: "The most important music of my life."

~*~

If God listens to and is inspired by Muddy Waters...what can we ordinary mortals do but watch and hear in awe and thank the real God (if she exists) for giving mankind music.

Hiding Sarah

I found this at dailykos, which is a site admittedly biased against McCain & Palin but this response by someone writing at the conservative zine National Review is still incredulous and mind-boggling! Like one of the comments at the thread said: "The spunky little governor with the big shiny gun has managed to turn a political debate into spank material for some very, very lonely men"

National Review's Rich Lowry writes:

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It's one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O'Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing.

It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

Indeed! Like Arianna Huffington wrote elsewhere:

"After Thursday night, the only thing Palin proved herself good enough for is starring in her own reality show. Watching Biden and Palin on the same stage was like watching a tennis champion walk onto Centre Court at Wimbledon only to find himself facing an over-eager amateur from the local high school. The only subject on which Palin displayed superior knowledge was when she corrected Biden on the proper delivery of "Drill, baby, drill!" Christie Hefner thought Palin's sex-tinged twist on the chant should be appropriated for a commercial. Perhaps for Viagra."

In fact, I have always thought the debates were nothing more than made-for-tv entertainment! Saw a headline in the Boston Herald today saying "Both still standing" ..as if it was a HBO special boxing match and they expected a KO or something! With 90 seconds given to given an answer, it is easy to not answer a question, let time run out and move on to the next question*. It was not Iffil's fault, it's just the fault of the format for the debates here in the US. Couric did a good job by comparison because she did not let Palin get away without answering a question.

And we all saw how Palin fared in that interview (and the one before that with Gibson). Expectedly, she was uncomfortable with the whole experience (and probably plans to hide from the media even more in days to come) and today she was on Faux News whining about Couric; like a little kid going to her mom and complaining about being harassed by a bully in the playground!

Palin On Fox News: Couric Annoyed Me
"The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," she said. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too."

Can imagine the response from her Fair & Balanced buddies: "I tell you...that Couric is so sexist - doesn't understand women what it takes to be a woman! Oh what? Oh ok...in that case, she's a liberal elitist from the immoral coast!" Take it away... OReilly & co..... mouth off!

Meanwhile, McCain's all touched and emotional :)

* Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

Public discourse or Entertainment?

Come debate time, I was hoping to write a short piece about the significance of the Presidential (& VP) debates in today's world vis-a-vis the impact of television and the internet as our main info-tainment sources today. It goes without saying that we have all got used to the instant gratification in its various forms through TV and especially the internet, with its 2 minute youtube videos and soundbytes and clips from the Daily Show and other 'news' outlets. This has had an impact on how we process and filter knowledge.

I first thought of writing an article while perusing through a recent book about the Douglas-Lincoln debates of 1858 but this was further re-emphasized when I read about Neil Postman's 1984 book: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

However, I do not have time to write it up as a proper article and a blog post will have to do. For now, just to give you the essence of my drift, is this para from the wiki entry for Postman's book.

..Postman posits that television is the primary means of communication for our culture and it has the property of converting a culture's conversations with itself into entertainment, so much so that public discourse on important issues has disappeared. Since the treatment of serious issues as entertainment inherently prevents them from being treated as serious issues and indeed since serious issues have been treated as entertainment for so many decades now, the public is no longer aware of these issues in their original sense, but only as entertainment.

Given that the debate forum does not allow for deeply delving into any issue, packaged trite comments and rhetoric is all that is enough to get through the debates unscathed. The moderator rarely pushes hard when given rhetoric and BS to uncomfortable questions i.e. insulting and really grilling these politicians is something we do not see on US TV. The UK does it well and even some shows on NDTV and Aaj Tak in India have comperes who really go after the politicians when they try to evade tough questions with something trite and banal or outright lies. However, I have never seen it in the US. So, in some sense, you don't really have to "win" the debates...just have to get through without it becoming a major disaster and that can be orchestrated well, as they did with Bush, who probably back then (and maybe even now) knew as much (or rather, as little) as Palin knows about world issues today.

So, while today's Biden-Palin debates may have been hyped up already to be the most anticipated VP debates in a long time, especially after her disastrous interviews to date with Gibson and Couric, I think she'll do just fine and get away with evasions, canned statements, vague and trite remarks, and outright lies.

P.S. How right I was! But Awshucks... I didn't know her winks would also be part of her repertoire to deal with the questions! :) Doggone it...you betcha now I know better! :)

a sexy sesquipedalian

I want to be a sexy sesquipedalian,
brevity is over-rated.

That's the first thing that came to mind after learning a new word from Maureen Dowd's writeup in the NYT today remembering Paul Newman. (Should say, much as I enjoy her snark and wit usually, somehow the article today was disappointing and does not do justice to Newman or her own writing talents. It seems like it was written in a hurry and not much thought was put into it and I don't say that only because it ends suddenly. Seems like a quick job that she felt obliged to do (due to Newmans death) in the midst of the political campaign... big let down for me; though I learned a word!)

Ok.. indulge me - feel like writing some bad poetry. :)

I want to be a sexy sesquipedalian,
brevity is over-rated.

I may be a man of few words,
but remember I'm the one who at 10 (or 12?)
had learned to spell
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis;
though I didn't care much for Greek dishes.*

You may undermine my effort through
floccinaucinihilipilification (2),
(arguably the longest word without an e)
and accuse me of antidisestablishmentarianism
(longest word excluding coined and technical ones)
but I'm just ....well...supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

* Lopadotemakhoselakhogameokranioleipsanodrimypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakekhymenokikhlepikossyphophattoperister-alektryonoptokephalliokigklopeleiolagōiosiraiobaphētraganopterýgōn.
2) "the act of describing something as worthless, or making something to be worthless by deprecation".

Take the A Train

Just read about a South African jazz pianist, Bheki Mseleku, who died earlier this month from complications from diabetes . He was only 53.

Here he is playing Duke Ellington's famous tune Take the A Train, with Joe Henderson and others. (I always thought that piece was composed by Ellington. Wiki enlightens that it "is a jazz standard by Billy Strayhorn that was the signature tune of the Duke Ellington orchestra. "

Hear the amazing piano playing by Mseleku around 3:45 to 5 minutes or so. Especially amazing considering it seems he " suffered the lose of the upper joints of two fingers in his right hand from a go- carting accident" during his childhood. RIP, Mseleku.



Love the sound of the bass, as always too.. and there is a great bass solo right after the piano.

Here's Brubeck's quartet playing the same piece



and of course, one of Ellington ...



Awesome, to say the least!

Beyond Good and Evil

Finally saw Dark Knight.

Much has been said about the movie probably and so I will avoid the temptation to say more here; I don't do movie or book reviews well anyways! But I just wanted to share some thoughts I had this evening after seeing the movie.

For one minute, forget that the Joker is evil. Who then would you root for -- the poseur who hides behind his mask or the WYSIWYG guy?

To me, the movie through the Joker character attempts to shred apart the shams humans hide under and tries to expose the motivations that drive human enterprise.

Also, I am not sure if the millions of Americans who went to see the movie saw beyond the action and saw it as a criticism of the post 9-11 world we live here.

We live in a world when sometimes it is not clear who is right or wrong and sometimes one can become the other (Dent, in this case) going through an extra-ordinary about-face (*shudder*... forget Heath's makeup. That was quite a make up on Eckhart in the last part of the movie!). The bad guy strikes and takes his loved one and the paragon of fighting evil in Gotham suddenly loses it... blames all and sundry and then himself falls prey to the evil in him. In some ways, the movie is supposed to make you look within yourself and realize that at some level, maybe we are all two-faced...though not in the exaggerated villainous comic-book/movie sort of way. I was reminded of Nietzsche* with the dialog, repeated a few times in the movie: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

In the end, sometimes though the good guy (Batman) may get the crazy terrorist (they even threw in the T word to describe the Joker's shenanigans, didn't they!) but at what cost? Your own soul has been corrupted in the process and your knight-in-shining-armor (Dent) has been rendered into a 'terrorist'.

The Nolan brothers tried to make this point with the whole two ships scene at the end too; though I think that scene (and whole last 1/3 of the movie) was a tad bit over done. Also, I found the whole ambivalence shown by the Morgan Freeman character about using surveillance to track the terrorists amongst us to be too preachy. (Ok..we'll use it this one time and then destroy it! What a cop-out!).

Anyways... I am sure all this has been said in the many reviews and hoopla following the movie -- but I am glad I saw the movie and went in without knowing what to expect.

Btw, I agree with most that it was an amazing performance by Heath, though the make-up helped! Wouldn't say it is one of the best acting performances I have ever seen but he's done a good job and given the emotional drive behind awarding the guy posthumously and the effort Warner Brothers is putting behind the movie for the Oscars, I think he's a shoo-in for the Oscar. I'd be surprised if he does not win; let alone be nominated, which he is almost 100% assured of at this point in time.

--
* He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.