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The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border by Suji Kwock Kim
Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border By which a strip of land became a hole in time – Durs Grünbein Grandfather I cannot find, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, what country do you belong to: where is your body buried, where did your soul go when the road led nowhere? Grandfather I'll never know, the moment father last saw you opens a wormhole that has no end: the hours became years, the years forever: and on the other side lies a memory of a memory or a dream of a dream of a dream of another life, where what happened never happened, what cannot come true comes true: and neither erases the other, or the other others, world after world, to infinity – If only I could cross the border and find you there, find you anywhere, as if you could tell me who he is, or was, or might have become: no bloodshot eyes, or broken bottles, or praying with cracked lips because the past is past and was is not is – Grandfather, stranger, give me back my father – or not back, not back, give me the father I might have had: there, in the country that no longer exists, on the other side of the war – This week marks a return-visit to the work of the award-winning Korean-American-British poet and playwright Suji Kwock Kim. It's from her pamphlet Notes from the North, published by Smith/Doorstop in 2022, and was a 2019 winner of its annual International Book and Pamphlet competition. Focused on the violent disruptions experienced by the poet's family members during the Korean war and subsequent North Korean dictatorship, the collection was described by Amy Wack, one of the competition judges, as 'a scorched family album, rescued from the ruin'. Search Engine is an invocation to the poet's grandfather, circling round a series of three apostrophes that suggest the intensifying fact of his absence: 'Grandfather I cannot find', 'Grandfather I'll never know' and 'Grandfather, stranger'. That the voice in its fruitless search reverberates over much of human history, 20th century history in particular, is signalled by the epigraph. In the East German poet Durs Grünbein's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog, the dog remembers the now-invisible border and the 'strip of land' he once guarded: 'Watchtowers are forgetful, / Like eyes which have been torn from their sockets. / Gone already: the separating place's / Two or three names. // The trick's now unbetrayed / which made a strip of land a hole in time. / I'm glad my brow does not reveal a thing.' Kim's triplet stanza gives a sense of the circularity of the search-within-a-search enforced by the 'hole in time'. For her, the hole is a wormhole. In her quest for the specificity she needs to flesh out the truth of her past, the searcher asks her grandfather: 'what country do you belong to: // where is your body buried, / where did your soul go / when the road led nowhere?' Why these questions are urgent is explained in the preceding poem, Searchlight. The grandfather leaves his 10-year-old son (the poet's future father) in a forest in North Korea's far north, 'whispering Wait in the woods until I come back.' But the boy's father doesn't return, ever. The poem evolves into a series of agonised questions as to why the abandoned son hasn't tried to find him. The searchlight's brightest illumination is saved for the questioner's final sharp pang of insight: 'Is it better not to know what happened, as if the not-knowing could keep him alive?' While the 'searchlight' has become a 'search engine' in the current poem, the wormhole of infinite connections flows on: it 'has no end', as time, for the child, waiting in the woods for his father to return, would have seemed to have no end. There is still a border between now and the past, and 'on the other side // lies a memory of a memory / or a dream of a dream of a dream / of another life …' The puzzle of alternative possibilities is interrupted in the ninth stanza by the device of making the challenged reality so harshly present it shoulders all alternative dreaming aside: 'no bloodshot eyes, or broken / bottles, or praying with cracked lips / because the past is past and was is not is – ' But again, there's a feeling of circularity in the shifts of consciousness suggested, between drunkenness and thirst, or sleeplessness and prayer. Scrupulously precise, despite her passion, the speaker utters her last plea ('Grandfather, stranger, / give me back my father –') and instantly checks herself, 'or not back, not back, give me the father // I might have had …' In the search engine of the poem, complexity of thought always coexists with openly expressed emotion. The title metaphor implies that the desire for answers could, should, be matched by the availability and interconnectivity of facts; if it's not, the drive to go on seeking answers in the absence of connection can be relentless. Physics can't help the recovery of the lost 'flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone …' Time can't be reversed, and the search is abandoned unfinished, 'there, in the country that no longer exists, / on the other side of the war –' Kim writes, 'There are an estimated 10 million separated families (이산가족) divided between North and South Korea, including my own.' For additional context, her short essay, no end / to the end, is essential reading.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border by Suji Kwock Kim
Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border By which a strip of land became a hole in time – Durs Grünbein Grandfather I cannot find, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, what country do you belong to: where is your body buried, where did your soul go when the road led nowhere? Grandfather I'll never know, the moment father last saw you opens a wormhole that has no end: the hours became years, the years forever: and on the other side lies a memory of a memory or a dream of a dream of a dream of another life, where what happened never happened, what cannot come true comes true: and neither erases the other, or the other others, world after world, to infinity – If only I could cross the border and find you there, find you anywhere, as if you could tell me who he is, or was, or might have become: no bloodshot eyes, or broken bottles, or praying with cracked lips because the past is past and was is not is – Grandfather, stranger, give me back my father – or not back, not back, give me the father I might have had: there, in the country that no longer exists, on the other side of the war – This week marks a return-visit to the work of the award-winning Korean-American-British poet and playwright Suji Kwock Kim. It's from her pamphlet Notes from the North, published by Smith/Doorstop in 2022, and was a 2019 winner of its annual International Book and Pamphlet competition. Focused on the violent disruptions experienced by the poet's family members during the Korean war and subsequent North Korean dictatorship, the collection was described by Amy Wack, one of the competition judges, as 'a scorched family album, rescued from the ruin'. Search Engine is an invocation to the poet's grandfather, circling round a series of three apostrophes that suggest the intensifying fact of his absence: 'Grandfather I cannot find', 'Grandfather I'll never know' and 'Grandfather, stranger'. That the voice in its fruitless search reverberates over much of human history, 20th century history in particular, is signalled by the epigraph. In the East German poet Durs Grünbein's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog, the dog remembers the now-invisible border and the 'strip of land' he once guarded: 'Watchtowers are forgetful, / Like eyes which have been torn from their sockets. / Gone already: the separating place's / Two or three names. // The trick's now unbetrayed / which made a strip of land a hole in time. / I'm glad my brow does not reveal a thing.' Kim's triplet stanza gives a sense of the circularity of the search-within-a-search enforced by the 'hole in time'. For her, the hole is a wormhole. In her quest for the specificity she needs to flesh out the truth of her past, the searcher asks her grandfather: 'what country do you belong to: // where is your body buried, / where did your soul go / when the road led nowhere?' Why these questions are urgent is explained in the preceding poem, Searchlight. The grandfather leaves his 10-year-old son (the poet's future father) in a forest in North Korea's far north, 'whispering Wait in the woods until I come back.' But the boy's father doesn't return, ever. The poem evolves into a series of agonised questions as to why the abandoned son hasn't tried to find him. The searchlight's brightest illumination is saved for the questioner's final sharp pang of insight: 'Is it better not to know what happened, as if the not-knowing could keep him alive?' While the 'searchlight' has become a 'search engine' in the current poem, the wormhole of infinite connections flows on: it 'has no end', as time, for the child, waiting in the woods for his father to return, would have seemed to have no end. There is still a border between now and the past, and 'on the other side // lies a memory of a memory / or a dream of a dream of a dream / of another life …' The puzzle of alternative possibilities is interrupted in the ninth stanza by the device of making the challenged reality so harshly present it shoulders all alternative dreaming aside: 'no bloodshot eyes, or broken / bottles, or praying with cracked lips / because the past is past and was is not is – ' But again, there's a feeling of circularity in the shifts of consciousness suggested, between drunkenness and thirst, or sleeplessness and prayer. Scrupulously precise, despite her passion, the speaker utters her last plea ('Grandfather, stranger, / give me back my father –') and instantly checks herself, 'or not back, not back, give me the father // I might have had …' In the search engine of the poem, complexity of thought always coexists with openly expressed emotion. The title metaphor implies that the desire for answers could, should, be matched by the availability and interconnectivity of facts; if it's not, the drive to go on seeking answers in the absence of connection can be relentless. Physics can't help the recovery of the lost 'flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone …' Time can't be reversed, and the search is abandoned unfinished, 'there, in the country that no longer exists, / on the other side of the war –' Kim writes, 'There are an estimated 10 million separated families (이산가족) divided between North and South Korea, including my own.' For additional context, her short essay, no end / to the end, is essential reading.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell review
My first and only experience with a Ouija board occurred when I was 11, at a friend's house. It was good, spooky fun until it wasn't. I recall movement and the start of a message before we recoiled from the board. Later that evening, I learned that my grandfather had died. While I realise now that a boy with a terminally ill relative and a lurid imagination was not the most reliable witness, I remember wanting to believe that I'd had a brush with the uncanny. When Times journalist Ben Machell's dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain's most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster. His answering machine filled up with pleas to investigate strange happenings around the country: a trawlerman mauled by an invisible hound, a house that bled water, a rural bungalow plagued by fires and expiring pets. Machell has honoured Cornell with an entrancing biography. Drawing on boxes of tapes and documents, an unpublished memoir and interviews with relatives and contemporaries, he hears 'the steady voice of a rational man methodically tapping the wall between reality and something else'. Cornell's approach was approvingly described as 'probing-doubt': curious without being credulous, sensitive yet rigorous. In 1977, he clashed with two SPR colleagues over the infamous Enfield poltergeist: a hoax, he decided, but they got a bestselling book out of it while Cornell's work, Machell writes, was largely 'unheralded, unrewarded and appreciated only by a small group of people'. Machell's elegantly thrilling yarn encompasses the broad history of paranormal research in the UK. In the middle of the 19th century, the tension between science and religion inspired a craze for 'proof' of life after death in the form of spiritualism – seances, clairvoyants, automatic writing – and a subsequent desire to assess its veracity. The SPR was founded in 1882, in a 'spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry'. Its members, including Lewis Carroll, future prime minister Arthur Balfour and psychologist William James, pioneered concepts such as telepathy and ectoplasm while exposing fraudulent mediums and 'spirit photographers'. The SPR proved so adept at debunking charlatans that Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass exodus of aggrieved spiritualists in 1930. The author's nemesis was the American researcher JB Rhine, whose new field of parapsychology focused on psychic phenomena rather than the spirit realm. A poltergeist, for example, might actually be 'recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis' – the violent discharge of mental energy by the living. Rhine's secular approach appealed to Soviet materialists, who explored telepathy as a potential cold war weapon. The physiologist Leonid Vasiliev, whom Tony Cornell visited in Leningrad in 1962, possibly at the behest of MI6, claimed that explaining extrasensory perception would be as significant as discovering atomic energy. The more concepts such as telekinesis excited the public, though, the more uneasy the group's rationalist wing became. In the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller and Stephen King's Carrie, Cornell's mentor Eric Dingwall snapped and repudiated parapsychology for feeding a 'new occultism'. Yet Cornell persisted. Even as he exposed numerous instances of mischief, attention-seeking and hallucination, he personally encountered a handful of phenomena that defied rational explanation. It was a mind-boggling experience in postwar India, too good to spoil here, that set him on this path in the first place. He still sought answers. During the 1990s, to his surprise, Cornell's answering machine fell silent. He wondered whether conspiracy theories had supplanted the paranormal in the public imagination, or perhaps digital distractions had dulled our receptivity to psychic disturbances. But had he not died in 2010, he would have seen a new generation of ghost hunters do a roaring trade on YouTube, where there is no financial incentive for his brand of cautious analysis. As Dingwall feared, entertainment has trumped genuine investigation. Like many a biographer, Machell falls half in love with his subject. Cornell was respected within the SPR for his diplomacy and his 'consistent willingness to be wrong'. Parapsychology may not be widely accepted as a branch of science, but Cornell had a true scientist's commitment to doubt and impartiality. At a time when beliefs leave facts in the dust, it's easy to share Machell's admiration for a man who was willing to say: 'I don't know.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural by Ben Machell is published by Abacus (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy from Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell review
My first and only experience with a Ouija board occurred when I was 11, at a friend's house. It was good, spooky fun until it wasn't. I recall movement and the start of a message before we recoiled from the board. Later that evening, I learned that my grandfather had died. While I realise now that a boy with a terminally ill relative and a lurid imagination was not the most reliable witness, I remember wanting to believe that I'd had a brush with the uncanny. When Times journalist Ben Machell's dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain's most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster. His answering machine filled up with pleas to investigate strange happenings around the country: a trawlerman mauled by an invisible hound, a house that bled water, a rural bungalow plagued by fires and expiring pets. Machell has honoured Cornell with an entrancing biography. Drawing on boxes of tapes and documents, an unpublished memoir and interviews with relatives and contemporaries, he hears 'the steady voice of a rational man methodically tapping the wall between reality and something else'. Cornell's approach was approvingly described as 'probing-doubt': curious without being credulous, sensitive yet rigorous. In 1977, he clashed with two SPR colleagues over the infamous Enfield poltergeist: a hoax, he decided, but they got a bestselling book out of it while Cornell's work, Machell writes, was largely 'unheralded, unrewarded and appreciated only by a small group of people'. Machell's elegantly thrilling yarn encompasses the broad history of paranormal research in the UK. In the middle of the 19th century, the tension between science and religion inspired a craze for 'proof' of life after death in the form of spiritualism – seances, clairvoyants, automatic writing – and a subsequent desire to assess its veracity. The SPR was founded in 1882, in a 'spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry'. Its members, including Lewis Carroll, future prime minister Arthur Balfour and psychologist William James, pioneered concepts such as telepathy and ectoplasm while exposing fraudulent mediums and 'spirit photographers'. The SPR proved so adept at debunking charlatans that Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass exodus of aggrieved spiritualists in 1930. The author's nemesis was the American researcher JB Rhine, whose new field of parapsychology focused on psychic phenomena rather than the spirit realm. A poltergeist, for example, might actually be 'recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis' – the violent discharge of mental energy by the living. Rhine's secular approach appealed to Soviet materialists, who explored telepathy as a potential cold war weapon. The physiologist Leonid Vasiliev, whom Tony Cornell visited in Leningrad in 1962, possibly at the behest of MI6, claimed that explaining extrasensory perception would be as significant as discovering atomic energy. The more concepts such as telekinesis excited the public, though, the more uneasy the group's rationalist wing became. In the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller and Stephen King's Carrie, Cornell's mentor Eric Dingwall snapped and repudiated parapsychology for feeding a 'new occultism'. Yet Cornell persisted. Even as he exposed numerous instances of mischief, attention-seeking and hallucination, he personally encountered a handful of phenomena that defied rational explanation. It was a mind-boggling experience in postwar India, too good to spoil here, that set him on this path in the first place. He still sought answers. During the 1990s, to his surprise, Cornell's answering machine fell silent. He wondered whether conspiracy theories had supplanted the paranormal in the public imagination, or perhaps digital distractions had dulled our receptivity to psychic disturbances. But had he not died in 2010, he would have seen a new generation of ghost hunters do a roaring trade on YouTube, where there is no financial incentive for his brand of cautious analysis. As Dingwall feared, entertainment has trumped genuine investigation. Like many a biographer, Machell falls half in love with his subject. Cornell was respected within the SPR for his diplomacy and his 'consistent willingness to be wrong'. Parapsychology may not be widely accepted as a branch of science, but Cornell had a true scientist's commitment to doubt and impartiality. At a time when beliefs leave facts in the dust, it's easy to share Machell's admiration for a man who was willing to say: 'I don't know.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural by Ben Machell is published by Abacus (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy from Delivery charges may apply.
Time of India
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
‘Grandfather': National Award winner MS Bhaskar returns in a lead role, A film with a twist of emotion and mystery
Actor M.S. Bhaskar, who won the Best Supporting Actor award at the 71st National Film Awards for his heart-warming performance in the film 'Parking', is currently playing a lead role in a new film. This new film is aptly titled 'Grandfather'. His National Award win has taken the film world by surprise. Following this, many film industry celebrities congratulated him. To celebrate the special moment, the first look poster of his upcoming film 'Grandfather' was unveiled by the makers. There is a lot of anticipation among the fans as he is seen playing the role of a grandfather in the poster. A debut with depth This film is directed by Prankstar Rahul. It is noteworthy that he is making his directorial debut with this film. In this film, M.S. Bhaskar plays the role of a loving, yet mysterious grandfather. Another special feature is that Prankstar Rahul is playing his grandson. The film seems to bring out a variety of emotions throughout, including family relationships, mutual feelings, and a bit of comedy mixed with horror. A talented ensemble behind the scenes The film stars Smika, Arul Das, Munishkanth, Srinath, Shiva Aravind , Priyadarshini, Anjali Rao, Abhinaya, and many others in the lead roles. Sridhar is handling the cinematography, and Ranjin Raj is composing the music. While Divakar handles the editing, Prem handles the art direction with great care. We can feel that this film is a quality effort both technically and artistically. Comedy, horror & heart – all in one 'Grandfather' is being developed as a horror fantasy film with a touch of comedy. The shooting of the film is currently in full swing. Overall, the film revolves around the grandpa-grandson relationship, like a personal family novel. This film is expected to have a profound impact on cinema fans. Expectations for this film, which is a blend of comedy, emotion, and mystery, are increasing day by day.
