This is coming later than I’d like, but I was pretty slammed with work Monday and Tuesday. Usually, Monday is my busy day. I strictly avoid working on the weekend, and avoid looking at work emails too, so Monday is when I respond to everyone’s weekend emails. Plus Monday is file delivery day for most comics publishers, which means last-minute revisions and pre-flight checks.
This week was a bit split, because some of my clients came back to work on 5th July, and others took the chance for a long weekend, so both Monday and Tuesday involved responding to post-weekend emails.
And I had a bunch of file deliveries too, with one book running late, which meant I was frantically lettering pages as they came in from the artist between all that other stuff. This is rare for me these days, so it threw me a bit.
Wednesday I consciously took off, because K is off to Delhi for almost a month, and I wanted to spend some time with her before I dropped her to the airport.
Anyway, on to a very late weekend update.
Jeeeeeesus, six months of this year are done. I’ll say, overall, this year has been a lot of fun for me. Getting a measure of control over the chronic pain I’ve had for three years, work going well (same with the work-life balance I’ve struggled with so much), some nice things happening in work and in life. There’s even been some electoral pushback against the rise of the right in several countries! Who’d expected that?!
I finally have some time and bandwidth to make some of the quality-of-life improvements I’ve wanted to for a while. One of those things is that I’m now actively planning to get a digital camera to do street photography and portraits. This is something I’ve wanted to do for about eight years, but I always talked myself out of it, because photography is an expensive hobby, and I haven’t made that much use of owning one of the best phone cameras in the world. But now seems the right time to approach this with some intentionality – drawing has helped me see composition differently than I did before, and my recent growing love for cinema has created something of a hunger for images.
I’m currently in the phase of chatting with photographers I know, and watching far too many YouTube videos about cameras and photography. I’ll keep you posted on how this goes.
In work-related things, last week saw the release of Robin: The Boy Wonder #3 with Juni Ba and Chris O’Halloran, from DC Comics.
It also ended with me signing the deal for the thing I hinted at last time. There’ll be an announcement soonish, after which I can tell you more.
I finished only one prose book last week, and it was one I had been waiting to read since the beginning of the year.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog/newsletter, you know that Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors was my favourite novel of last year. So I’ve been waiting for his follow-up, Rakesfall, ever since I knew of its impending existence.
Now that I’ve read it, I can see why so many reviewers have had such difficulty talking about it – it’s a hell of a book to get your head around. I’m not sure I’ve begun digesting it – I’ll have to read it a couple of more times, but that absolutely delights me. After I’d read about a third of it, I came across this essay on Reactor (formerly Tor.com) about the pleasure of reading books you don’t fully understand. Halfway through it, I started thinking about Rakesfall in this context, and told myself I was having a “Boss Baby vibes” moment, and then the author herself started talking about Rakesfall.
Anyway – it’s sort of useless to try and summarise Rakesfall. There are these two … souls? Entities? Post-singularity cloud backups? And they reincarnate over and over, in the past and the future, in this world and in others. Sometimes they’re two, sometimes they’re one, sometimes three? I’m not entirely sure. The whole things rhymes with the Ramayana, or with parts of it. Like I said, I’ll need a few more reads to figure this out.
I would, though, hesitate to say “there is no plot”, because that’s not what’s going on here. As I mentioned to Vajra when I was still about a third of the way through, this book reminded me, in spirit if not in deed, of Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren, in that it’s difficult to always be sure what, precisely, is going on, but all of it does something to you. Rakesfall is more straightforward than Dhalgren, although there’s a section right after the first, fairly straightforward if highly inventive section, that seems to be deliberately alienating (as Alan Moore said about beginning The Voice of the Fire with “Hob’s Hog”, “to keep out scum”) to get you used to the near-vertiginous lurches in time and space before the rest of the narrative settles in to do what it’s going to do.
The shadow of the 20th century and its fiction looms over this book, with large sections concerning television, traditional media, the Sri Lankan civil war, and a chapter even formatted as a play. And yet, for all that it reads a bit like an experimental novel, one never gets the sense that anything is being done for the heck of it. It takes a lot, after all, to cram several novels’ worth of ideas and narratives into a book that’s just about 300 pages long – too much for it to be a mere formalist exercise.
For all that The Saint of Bright Doors subverted the kinds of stories that get told in these genres and strained at their boundaries, it was firmly a story among them. Rakesfall, on the other hand, explodes what it means to do a genre book and does so while firmly being a genre book, thankyouverymuch. If you asked me which one I liked more, it’d still have to be Saint, because it’s such a satisfying story, and it introduced me to the way Vajra writes and thinks on the page. Rakesfall is a greater book, though, bigger in every way, at least partly because it resists that urge to satisfaction. Saint makes you question where you got the sense of what satisfies you in a story, Rakesfall denies it to you entirely.
It is also canny of the publisher (or of Vajra) to release this as his second novel after the rapturous reception of The Saint of Bright Doors. He could’ve easily released another novel of similar motives – been “that guy” for sff – and if Rakesfall had come third or fourth in that career, it could’ve been seen as a shock, a bit of misstep, an indulgence. And if it had come first, it might have alienated a majority of the audience. Instead, it comes at precisely the right time to open its audience’s minds instead of baffling them. Saint makes Rakesfall’s ambitions and its obfuscations easier to see for what they are – deliberate, confident swings by a writer intent not to rest on his laurels, but to continue expanding what he can do, and therefore show the field what it could be doing.
Just last week, I wrote about the idea of “novels in comics”, and talked about what a “novel” even means. For me, a Novel is something associative, something beyond just a narrative, a place where a writer can put things together because they want to see what the arrangement looks like, and those things then belong together because they were placed together. Far too much, in modern fiction, we prize efficiency, narrative svelteness, the urge to remove all things extraneous. With Rakesfall, it is gladdening to see that even in genre fiction, we can still have Proper Novels.
Movies:
Laapataa Ladies (Lost Women): A sweet and simply made film, with a basic but nonetheless valid message of women’s liberation. Lots of quirky characters and some heartfelt emotion here, and Ravi Kishan is magnificent as the corrupt policeman with his somewhat tarnished heart in the right place.
In a Violent Nature: A fun subversion of the standard slasher film – this is filmed (mostly) from the point of view of the slasher (following right behind him as if we were in a first-person video game), and follows him wandering about between his kills. The idea is to make a Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Had Their Heads Lopped Off, so to speak, a movie that exists in the interstices of the proper movie – the one with the teenagers taking an inadvisable trip to a lonely cabin next to a lake – and that collides with the conventional slasher film at the point of the killings.
Both K and I enjoyed this, particularly the longueurs, which are what I gather brought the film most of its criticisms. It’s shot beautifully, inventively, and the violence is creative in a way that particularly works with how quiet most of the film is (hats off to the sound designers). I did find the writing a bit simple and far too expository. I understand why – the creators still want you to “get” the characters and the motivations of the teenagers, even as they deny you the rest of the normal version of this film. But I wish they’d gone a bit further and left it entirely to your imagination or comprehension. My favourite scene was the one that seems to have, oddly, garnered the most criticism. It’s the final scene – a quiet scene of conversation that nevertheless manages to ramp up the tension that’s been living in the film for all this time and rubs your face in it. A great, great scene, and it absolutely makes what would’ve otherwise been just a clever but erratic film.
Taxi Tehran: Another of the four movies that Jafar Panahi has made (so far) during his ban from making movies. At first, this feels like a slice-of-life – Panahi drives a taxi, picking up acquaintances and strangers, and has amusing, involved conversations with them. This continues the faux-real style he’s adhered to more and more, the idea that we might just be watching a documentary.
But over time, a narrative emerges. Panahi, we realise, is angry about the Iranian government’s ruling to execute petty criminals for theft, and nearly every conversation in the film has been about crime – small crimes like pirating foreign films and people stealing for survival, and big crimes like political agitation and making films that violate Iran’s rules on siahnamayi – the idea that Iranian films should always show Iran in a “good” light. His final guest is Nasrin Sotoudeh, a human rights lawyer who fought on his behalf in the past, who is currently on her way to see a girl imprisoned for having snuck into a football match (remember Offside?) and who was herself in prison till 2021 (she’s been out on an indefinite medical furlough).
Panahi is characteristically wry and playful, but the anger shows through – it takes a lot, after all, to make films in secret because you simply must. The playfulness extends to the nature of the film itself, which doesn’t have any credits because, it is implied, it was released by the thieves who break into Panahi’s taxi and steal his camera at the end of the film. What a fucking filmmaker.
This Closeness: Low-budget chamber drama written by and starring Kit Zauhar, about a couple who rents a room on Airbnb in a house that has one more person staying in it. It’s not essential viewing – it mostly works in the style of low-stakes mumblecore – but it uses sound very well to convey and accentuate emotions the characters are having trouble expressing, and there are some interestingly gnarly and ugly human moments here. Finally, I was impressed with the way it manages to use its single location – a two-bedroom flat – to great effect. It feels like it could’ve said more about its central idea of emotional isolation juxtaposed with extreme physical proximity, but it doesn’t quite get there.
Naked (rewatch): I’m not sure why, but watching Panahi’s movies recently made me think of possibly my favourite filmmaker when I was a teenager – Mike Leigh. I borrowed his DVDs from the British Council Library – at first because they had a nice red 18+ rating on the cover, and I thought that implied sexual content, but later because I found his approach to quiet human drama unique among the filmmakers I’d been watching till then. I also found the dialogue in his films fascinating, and soon realised that was because it was improvised by the actors in rehearsals before being compiled into a script for filming.
This was one of his films that didn’t fully gel with me at the time, so I thought it might be worth trying again. It still isn’t my favourite among Leigh’s films (that would be either All or Nothing or Life Is Sweet), but it is far stronger than I remembered it – a plotless exploration of aimless working class youth in post-Thatcher England, with a few beautiful visual sequences (particularly the silhouetted conspiracy-tinged rant set in the empty skyscraper), with a magnificent central performance from David Thewlis which would’ve been star-making if there had been any justice in the Western film world.
I’m hoping the next weeknotes are closer to the weekend. We’ll find out together.