#Narcopolis

[c-schroed]

Now Is the Perfect Time to Watch Some Movies Set in 2024

Now that we've made it to the new year, why not enjoy some old visions of it? I at least love to start the first few weeks of a year by going through the films set in the new year, as listed marvellously by Wikipedia.

Because I'm interested in old visions of the now-present, I usually skip movies that were produced in the last ten years. Because these usually don't provide very bold predictions. This criterion leaves the following seven entries for a Get Ready for '24 watchlist:

Beyond the Time Barrier. A 1960 time travel flick. Never heard of it. A quick look at the plot reminds me of Return to the Planet of the Apes. Which I kinda liked for its batshit abstrusity. Anyway, the movie is short and exactly what I'm looking for. So I'll definitely try to somehow get my hands on it.

A Boy and His Dog. This 1975 movie likely is the most notorious of this list. Not sure how well the film has aged, but it has been loitering on my to do list for years now, so the stars are aligned as good as never before.

Highlander II: The Quickening. Very likely to be the worst movie of this list. Haven't seen it yet, I think (or I forgot it after watching). And I haven't heard anything good of it, but at least it tells a story related to climate change. Which is better than nothing, I guess.

The Thirteenth Floor. I absolutely l o v e the German TV movie "World on a Wire", and Thirteenth Floor is a remake of this. I watched it once, but before seeing World on a Wire. So although Thirteenth Floor has only on small bit of its plot actually taking place in 2024, I really look forward to a rewatch of this 1999 production.

.hack//The Movie. A 2011 CGI anime movie. Never heard of it, but why not.

Underworld: Awakening and Underworld: Blood Wars. I remember liking the first Underworld movie, and I don't recall much of the other four films. So I think I'll use the final two installments playing in 2024 as an excuse for a rewatch of the whole series.

Narcopolis. This is a 2015 movie, so my Older Than Ten Years rule technically disqualifies this entry. But I'm quite intrigued by the story of a UK that has all drugs legalized. So I'll give it a watch.

[spockvarietyhour]

Jonathan Pryce

[cultfaction]

Narcopolis (2015)

In 2024, the manufacture and consumption of drugs has been legalized. Drecks are an elite unit created by an over-stretched police force to keep the black market dealers off the streets and the licensed drug companies rich. When dreck and former addict Frank Grieves is called to investigate an unidentifiable corpse, he makes a connection to the biggest and most powerful drug producer of them all:…

[adorationx]

Elodie Young in Narcopolis

[floridakilo]

whats ur thesis about!!

so i made up this literary archetype called "the narcopolis" which is basically just representations of the city/drugs simultaneously and im arguing that a variety of fiction from 1880 to 1900 kickstarted that trend within the 20th/21st century...my main texts are jekyll and hyde dorian gray and dracula and im also looking at modern films from the 1990s etc etc

abstract under the cut

From the confessional literature of the Beat Generation to mass market media like HBO’s The Wire, the motif of addiction seems to go hand in hand with the setting of the city. As Graham Caveney writes, “the relationship of junkie to city is not merely that of inhabitant to environment, it is the relationship of addiction itself,” one joined at the proverbial hip like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (132). In this thesis, I look to three foundational works of urban Gothic fiction from the fin de siècle as potential precursors to this influential archetype in contemporary fiction: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In each narrative, a pattern of compulsive substance-taking within the backdrop of the city fashions the streets of London into another kind of narcotic, ready to be consumed by the urban spectator or flâneur. Using a combination of close reading and historical analysis, I show how portrayals of the “narcopolis” purposefully played into the curiosities of a late nineteenth century readership enamored by London’s status as a supposed terra incognita. Likewise, as Elizabeth Young notes, “the very profound influence exerted on [contemporary culture] by the Symbolists and Decadents has been too little understood” (249). Through their actualization of the narcopolis in each narrative, I argue that Stevenson, Wilde, and Stoker’s pseudo-realistic conceptions of the city and the experience of addiction represent an important cultural throughline for later urban narratives, including William S. Burroughs' Junky and Abel Ferrara's The Addiction, amongst others.

[sulfurousmirrorscapes]

What are some Indian authors/Indian works of literature you would recommend? I’d like to expand my repertoire and you seem like a well-read person with thoughtful opinions 🤔

I am not nearly as well-read as you probably think, especially not in Indian literature. I find most Indian literature extremely depressing, and so I usually avoid it - but that's not something I'm proud of.

Looking at my list of books, I recommend the collected plays of Girish Karnad above all else. He wrote in Kannada and had an excellent grasp of Indian history, which is where most of his stories are set.

I read a book called Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil last year. It was stuck in my head for 10 years, ever since I read in a newspaper interview that its first chapter is one long run-on sentence. It's set in the opium dens of Bombay during the 1970s, and it's filthy in its world of paan-stained grime and opium haze and cheap sex, but Thayil is a poet at heart and that's what I appreciate about his writing - he makes reading his book itself feel like a collaborative work of art.

I read The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb in 2015, which is a non-fiction panorama of modern India (in 2011), and I thought it was really enchanting in showing me the many, many sides of modern India that go under the radar. The images that book conjured haven't read my head all these years. I'll have to steal such a passage from it later.

[artemis-de-la-lune]

since i'm from india, i present to you (i know most of you are aware of this, but here we go)

🌜Indian dark academia🌛

book recommendations (part one):

Indian literary classics

the guide by R K Narayan

malgudi days by RK Narayan

the private life of Indian prince by Mulk Raj Anand

untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand

train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh

godan by Munshi Premchand

the room on the roof by Ruskin Bond

the complete adventures of feluda by Satyajit Ray

combat of shadows by Manohar Malgonkar

the autobiography of an unknown indian by Nirad C. Chaudhari

literary fiction

the God of small things by Arundhati Roy

the white tiger by Aravind Adiga

the inheritance of loss by Kiran Desai

a suitable boy by Vikram Seth

sea of poppies by Amitav Ghosh

narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

the great Indian novel by Shashi Tharoor

fasting, feasting by Anita Desai

the house of blue mangoes by David Davidar

vanity bagh by Anees Salim

[theseplacesliveon]

[literaryfragments]

Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts , and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

[theclownprnc-arch]

one / name / alias.    Roy two /  birthday.      30 November three / zodiac sign.     Sagittarius four /  height.     5′3 five  /  hobbies.      Writing, artsy things, graphic design, video editing, gaming and also coding (even if it gives me a freakin’ headache sometimes). six /  favourite colors.     Red and black. seven / favourite books.     I feel like I always list the same few books but...  The Blind Assassin by M. Atwood, Gentlemen by K. Östergren, Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil and also Muck by Wojciech Kurczok (I’m not sure this book was ever translated to English, but it’s one of those that ripped my heart out, stomped on it and put it back in). eight  /  last song listened to.     Real Love Song by Nothing But Thieves. nine  /  last film watched.    Nowadays I’m watching mainly shows, but I guess it was Gone Girl? That’s quite a comfort film of mine. ten  /  inspiration for muse.    Recently I find myself re-watching BTAS or checking out some the Arkham series gameplays a lot when I try to kickstart my muse. If we’re talking about more general inspiration, I definitely take a lot from pre-New 52 comics. Probably The Killing Joke had the biggest impact on my portrayal, but honestly, I pick a bunch of things from different media (except for the films, I kind of push these aside) and throw them all into the mix. eleven  / dream job.     Well... I don’t know? Tattoo artist, perhaps? twelve  / meaning behind your url.    Just ‘the clown prince’ with some letters missing.

TAGGED BY: @thegreenxrcher​ & @thecursedhellblazer​ (thank you! ♥) TAGGING: YOU!

[liveindiatimes]

Jeet Thayil on his new novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints - books guest writers

https://liveindiatimes.com/jeet-thayil-on-his-new-novel-the-book-of-chocolate-saints-books-guest-writers/

Jeet Thayil was born in 1959 in Kerala at his mother’s ancestral tharavad on the banks of the Muhattupuzha River. He was educated at Jesuit schools in Bombay, Hongkong, and New York, and worked as a journalist for twenty-three years before writing his first novel, Narcopolis. This interview was recorded over the course of two afternoons at the writer’s family home in Bangalore. Getting Thayil to speak was, in this interviewer’s opinion, akin to pulling teeth without anesthesia. The writer left the room several times, for long stretches, to make coffee, to answer the door, and for other mysterious and unexplained reasons. The only time he expressed any enthusiasm was when he was told that the interview was at an end.

INTERVIEWER: I’d like to start by asking whether living in India, in the midst of a multi-religious society, has had an affect on the way you look at faith. For instance, a writer brought up in Bombay will have a very different set of responses toward Islamophobia than a writer brought up in Brooklyn. I find there is a calibrated awareness of religious difference in your poetry and fiction, a response that appears to be democratic in its belligerence. Do you agree that this kind of syncretic allusiveness is a result of having been brought up in India?

THAYIL: I have no idea.

The author’s bio in your book states that you were a journalist for twenty-three years. In that case wouldn’t your style be profoundly affected by the practice and discipline of writing on deadline? What I mean to ask is: Has your background in non-fiction been a vital resource in the writing of this novel? The chapters set in New York following Sept. 11 seem to be ripped from the headlines, and there are set pieces of pure non-fiction, for instance the trial scene of Frank Roque in the courtroom in Mesa, Arizona. Would it be accurate to say that you have mixed fiction and non-fiction in a way that makes it difficult to know where one ends and the other begins?

Maybe.

What do you mean by “vengeful or bewildered or helpless nostalgia”? Is it similar to the feeling you get when you realize you had the lyrics of a song wrong all along? For example, I always thought the words of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ were how wonderful life is alone in the world. When I realized it was in fact how wonderful life is when you’re in the world the discovery filled me with, I suppose, a kind of bewildered nostalgia. Is that what the phrase means?

Not really.

I notice also that some of the characters in your novel are real-life personalities, for instance, the poet Philip Nikolayev, and your father, the author and journalist, T.J.S.George, who are both quoted at length. How true to life are those passages? Is it a kind of fictionalized journalism, or a kind of true fiction?

I’m not sure.

Also, much of the book seems to be a thinly disguised version of the life of the poet Dom Moraes, with allusions to the painter FN Souza. I notice that you have retained the first names of Moraes’s parents, Beryl and Frank. Does this make the novel a kind of roman à cléf?

It’s certainly a possibility.

Jeet Thayil ( © BASSO CANNARSA )

Part oral history, part road movie and travel journal, part 9/11 memoir, part discovery of India, The Book of Chocolate Saints seems like an unclassifiable beast of a novel. The oral history, in particular, in which you have named the Bombay poets of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, with particular emphasis to Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, and so on—is it an attempt to present actual slices of history under the rubric of ‘A Novel’?

Yes, thank you.

Would you agree that this is an extremely literary novel? I mean there is a monologue by Goody Lol during the act of sex that ends with the words yes I said yes I will yes and of course those are the seven words with which Joyce ends Nora Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses. There are allusions to Baudelaire, Allen Ginsberg, the Hungryalists and Auden. At one point V.S. Naipaul makes a kind of cameo appearance as God, and Indira Gandhi makes a cameo, not to mention Van Gogh and Rothko and a parade of real and made-up saints. It all seems terribly literary, and art-obsessive. Didn’t you worry this would make the novel hard to sell?

Of course I did.

Could you describe the book for us?

The Book of Chocolate Saints is the story of Newton Francis Xavier, blocked poet, serial seducer of young women, reformed alcoholic (but only just), philosopher, recluse, all-round wild man and India’s greatest living painter. At the age of sixty-six, Xavier, who has been living in New York, is getting ready to return to the land of his birth to stage one final show of his work (accompanied by a mad bacchanal). As we accompany Xavier and his partner and muse Goody on their unsteady and frequently sidetracked journey from New York to New Delhi, the venue of the final show, we meet a host of memorable characters—the Bombay poets of the seventies and eighties, ‘poets who sprouted from the soil like weeds or mushrooms or carnivorous new flowers, who arrived like meteors, burned bright for a season or two and vanished without a trace’, journalists, conmen, murderers, alcoholics, addicts, artists, whores, society ladies, thugs—and are also given unforgettable (and sometimes unbearable) insights into love, madness, poetry, sex, painting, saints, death, God and the savagery that fuels all great art. Narrated in a huge variety of voices and styles, all of which blend seamlessly into a novel of remarkable accomplishment, The Book of Chocolate Saints is the sort of literary masterpiece that only comes along once in a very long time.

READ MORE: Book Review: Collected Poems by Jeet Thayil

But isn’t that your publisher’s blurb?

Yes. I doubt if I could do better. Besides, I feel I’ve said everything there is to say. It’s all in the book; I’m talked out.

Fair enough. Anything you’d like to add?

No.

Source link

[adorationx]

Elodie Young in Narcopolis

[the--muse]

How will the ships navigate without stars? And then he remembered that the stars were dead, long dead, and the light they shed was not to be trusted, was false, if not an outright lie, and in any case was inadequate, unequal to its task, which was to illuminate the evil that men did.

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

[floridakilo]

Inventing the Narcopolis:

Addiction and Urbanity in Late Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I5vka11XZNrfDgzJActw9o7vWHtsZesk/view?usp=sharing

From the confessional literature of the Beat Generation to more mainstream media like HBO’s The Wire, depictions of drug addiction seem to go hand in hand with the setting of the city. In the following thesis, I look to various examples of urban Gothic fiction from the fin de siècle as potential precursors to this influential trend within contemporary culture: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In each narrative, a pattern of compulsive substance-taking within the backdrop of London fashions the city into a different kind of narcotic, ready to be consumed by the urban spectator or flâneur. While tracking the thematic evolution of addiction and urbanity across these three foundational texts, I show how portrayals of the “narcopolis” purposefully played into the curiosities of a Victorian readership enamored by London’s identity as a terra incognita—a trend that had meaningful influence on later urban Gothic narratives moving forward into the next century.

[iamvickiroberts]

#runnersupthursday #iamvickiroberts #narcopolis #jeetthayil #bookerprize #bringingupthebodies #hilarymantel #fiction #novels

[theseplacesliveon]