in which bogey attends an awards function.
Happy May Day, all. This year, being a somewhat socialist/somewhat liberal, I decided to celebrate by recalling other ditherers in Indian history. Thus, the Romantic Revolutionary
M.N. Roy straddles both ‘internal’ challenges to liberalism in the last century: socialism and nationalism. He used each to challenge the orthodoxies of the other, constructing an elegant (if neglected) analysis of self-determination movements along the way. Roy took upon himself the unenviable task of having faith but no obedience, and the price he paid for it was being right in obscurity.
No longer, etc. Bogey to the rescue!
In other news,
This post restores the original title of my Himal essay on Indian graphic novels, and was written to acknowledge a range of people. The good folk at mylaw allow me the freedom to chronicle my obsessions. One went from sniping about Kari to adoring Kavalier & Clay (Luna Moth is my inner superhero) to prophecies of interstitial living.
I owe a great debt of thanks, further, to Bidisha Basu (of Leaping Windows) for putting me in touch with Alok Sharma. My gratitude to Alok is, I hope, well reflected in the essay, for he put me in touch with worlds I would had no hope of grasping without him. His documentary, once it comes out, looks to be a trove of info for comics nerds, especially those who would delve deeper than more Marvel this and DC that. I also owe Sarnath Banerjee, not so much because he helped my essay along- though he did- but because he redeemed my faith in human conversation.
Roberto Paez, illustrating Don Quixote
I was supposed to ask him questions about the ‘scene’ and industry finance and such, but our conversation soon drifted off into nerdy image/text deliberations and I abandoned all my Serious Relevant questions.
We discussed, in order: Luna Moth and the naming of Phantomville; psuedo-science; vicco vajradanti; Joe Sacco, ‘his abominable Gaza book’, and sexy locations in graphics journalism; empathy in writing; Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection; King Leopold of Belgium; Lewis Carroll; relative merits of the Scott Pilgrim and Ghostworld movies; Marshall McLuhan; the accurate pronunciation of Alain Robbet-Grillet and the mysterious tendency people have of acquiring accents after six hours at the Dubai airport.
Things we didn’t talk about (but I wish we had) are Superman’s recent rhetoric about American foreign policy and the Swamp Thing cognition experiment. If you know you aren’t ‘alive’, but retain every memory of being human, what does that make you? Do superheroes teach us a manichean ethic of malevolence/benevolence; do they ‘sublimate a culture of victimhood to manufacture one of enterprise and liberty’? Do they foster a blind arrogance in human capacity? In human generosity? The American Dream is sold to us across millions of panels and genres: whether you read Archie or Flaming Arrow. (Ok, so I made that last up. But she would be a neat superhero, non?).
For all the randomness of our conversation, it was not nearly as entertaining as the one the divine Kuzhali Manickavel had with a member of the Hyderabad Graphic Novel Project. They discuss kolams and fractals, speculate on furtive inspirations behind the Matrix trilogy, and decide that the classic song ‘If you come today’ is all about quantum indeterminacy.
VT Thomas, "Toms"
