Hear ye Romans:

By Toutatis, I have recently accquired all of the Asterix comics as scanned pdf files from a top secret location. Each comic book is roughly 12-14 MB in size, and I will be putting links here so that the interested folks can download and enjoy them as well. So here is the first comic, Asterix the Gaul. Further, if you want any specific Asterix comic, such as Asterix in Spain etc, leave a comment here, and I will try to oblige you as soon as I can.

And if you would like to dig through all the Latin and classical refrences that these fantastic comics abound in, these crazy self described "small group of indomitable comic book enthusiasts still holding out against the mindless "entertainment" of TV and fight for intelligent humour" have constructed the Asterix Annotations for our edification!!

I was given a copy of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novel ‘English, August’ (EA), which was recently reissued under the NYRB Classics imprint, a few weeks ago along with that strange book of short stories by Etgar Keret, about which I had raved here already. Thank you Senor C for your kind, and timely gifts.

I had read EA for the first time, almost ten years ago, after having signed up to receive it on a list for brand new books (yes, there were other crazy consumers of print with whom I had to tussle with for just off the press fiction) in the hostel library. And as most of my reading activity went at that time, this book too was duly stuffed into my word gullet as quickly as I could manage, in big large gulps. I think in my reading world view then, there were too many books and authors who were awaiting my urgent finger ministrations.

And now ten years later, given that quantity of unread, barely scanned, and half read books I have scattered around me on my bed, I seem to have gone all soft on this business of literary triage. I read slowly, weave in and out of too many books, which implies books get finished only if they manage to sustain my interest.

However looking at the upside of this change in reading styles, I would like to think I have become, if not a better reader in the Borgesian sense, then at least in a more reflective one. This then was my method in reading, or more accurately, rereading EA, twenty or so pages every night for the past few weeks, with my trusty red pen in hand.

The most interesting thing I have discovered about EA is that EA is not a funny or comic novel at all. And my memory of it as being this hysterical novel, full of kinky jokes, for example the constantly recurring black bra (as donned by the collector’s wife, Mrs. Shrivatsav)) visuals, is ‘hazaar fucked’ (i.e., thousand fucked, to borrow the only phrase I did remember from the novel all these years)

EA is actually a very serious novel with the jokes masking a great degree of sadness as well lucidity about the existential confusion people of certain kind (including myself) suffer from, all of this which I completely missed as I read this book as a much younger person. This altered reading experience, perhaps, lends support to the thesis that certain novels, if not all of them, have inbuilt timed release mechanisms, very much like certain drugs, and that the reader will be able to respond to them at an appropriate (deeper?) level only when he too attains a certain vintage.

So those of you kind readers, who might have read this novel when it came out many years ago, you should revisit this book once more soon. And for those of you, who have never read it before, go get it now!

So to beat the night time ennui that comes the silences that he had fallen out of the habit of, and also because he is too unsettled to use such time to read an actual book, he wanders, meanders, reading others' words on their readings.

The first one that catches his attention is a piece from a to be published book on Joseph Cornell by Mr. Foer, the recently annointed literary rockstar. He remembers his first encounter with Cornell's boxes a few years ago at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. These boxes, if he remembers right were displayed right next to Calder's crazy, because they are magical, mobiles, and also in close proximity to Andy Wharol's trashy vision of Marylin Monoroe.

And their effect on him was immediate, and subconcious; so much so that by the time he had to leave that city, out of an ammalgamation of shells, pebbles, algae, twigs, cardboard, yellowing newspapers and glue; he left behind a construction, for his friend and host, and this was perhaps nothing more than the continous extension of his backyard sandlot revieries that ended when he was thirteen

Later he encountered Joseph Cornell again, this time via the work of Octavio Paz, who had termed Cornell's boxes “slot machines of visions”. This encounter happened when he was browsing a curious book of poems in a bookstore, which was born as a result of a joint collaboration between Paz and his wife Maria Jose, with Paz's wife constructing boxes similar to Conrell's and Paz writing a poem for each new box. This process he later attempted to recreate using photographs in writing what he termed Image-ned Words.

...

This review of a biography on Orson Welles (of Citizen Kane fame) is interesting for this interesting observation on the recently beautified St. Ronald:

This is also makes for interesting reading from an Indian context given that over there showbiz charisma routinely translates into political capital.

...

Jane Smiley continues her exploration in the dense and magical forest of the novel by talking about "Zeno's Conscience", which is apparently in the same leauge as Kafka's 'Trial", and whose name I haven't encountered until this review. A funny qoute:

...

A.0. Scott's essay in the NYT Book Review explains the process through which Toni Morrison's "Beloved" is chosen as the best American novel in the past 25 years. And yes, since I spend too much time catching up on book gossip like this, I must admit I haven't read any of the novels, perhaps beyond the first 5 pages, mentioned in this essay.

...

For music we have Frank Zappa, whom I consider one of the most indespensible musicians of the last 25 years, for all his very very vulgar and very very postmodern work: