Favourite books - and the never-agains

Inspired by this page, our buddy The Babu has put together a list of his own. And he wants to know which books YOU read again and again. And also the ones you will never read again. Stroll over, why doncha?

Bespoke link

A few weeks ago, this blog visited Wankaner's Ranjit Vilas palace, as guests of the former Maharajah.
Nay, we hasten to add, those aren't the circles we normally move in. That was for Outlook Traveller, and the issue is out. You can read an extract here (third story - and the cover, he said, simpering coyly), and if you like it, do go buy the mag. We want them to do well and give us more assignments that will postpone the need for Real Work and give us time to blog for you. So there, it's your interests we have at heart.

History lessons

A litte while ago, we posted on some fascinating new developments in the field of comics, made possible by technology. And that got us thinking about the past. A little digging and Googling later, we found this, which we present for your consideration and enjoyment: The History of the Cartoon according the ghost of the late lamented Punch.
After we mailed that out, a friend (thanks Swapna) sent us back a link to this scholarly look at the history of Caricature, which goes much further back than the Punch piece. Most interesting to us was to see that things that we thought were relatively modern cartooning innovations date back quite a bit. Like The Shadow Knows, which Mad used to run, and Axe ripped off for its commercials, and a face morphing into something else, like a vegetable, which, we're sure, you've seen often, most recently in the TOI's election coverage.

In which we attempt to demonstrate that we do not just Link, but can also Converse. (And continue to name drop.)

A couple of weeks ago, we sent this article[*] (about advances in technology that now permit one to make an exact copy of a piece of sculpture) around to our long-suffering mailing list, and one of the people who wrote back, our pen-pal, the writer and artist Manjula Padmanabhan (there we go dropping names again), who has been having a spot of bother with a magazine reproducing her work without permission, said

Very cool article! It answers a question that's been popping up in my head from time to time -- how can we cut down the boring features of art?
I have made an occasional dab at sculpting (I think in 3D) but there's always the tedious effort of removing physical matter. I would adore to make just the one piece and have it endlessly copied ... Painters haven't been displaced by photographers. But copyright lawyers are going to have a new level of tension to deal with.
I have been in contact with a young lawyer-to-be who wanted to know what authors felt about piracy -- the drift of his questions suggested that he felt authors get too much for doing something that might as well be in the public domain -- amongst his reference points was epic literature, which belonged to the community at large -- no doubt you see the glaring blind spot in his point of view -- but it was interesting nevertheless to see by how much the law misses the truth of a situation. Anjolie Menon's recent entanglements with an assistant who began knocking off and selling her paintings does throw up a peculiar problem -- she taught him to paint in her style, so she gave him the keys to her kingdom -- but she won't allow him to gain any profit from them!
Curiosities, all.

To which we, scenting blogpost, said:

Tried my hand at sculpture too. And that "tedious effort" sometimes gets a bit much, yes! i think i enjoy additive sculpture more than the subtractive kind.
On Ms Menon - i don't think she's objecting to him using the keys of the kingdom as much as pretending he owns it, so to speak, by passing off his work as hers. Poor lad, i imagine if he were to sign his own name to them, he wouldn't make much of a living.
This whole thing about copyright has occupied much mindspace over the years.
For a musician, some people think that it should perhaps be that recordings should be freely available (and free!), and that they would operate as an introduction to the musician(s), with the income coming in from live concerts. Which, of course, pisses off the music companies no end, because they get cut out of the earnings stream. Writers are the other ones whose work is easily ripped off with modern tech. And i haven't heard of any similar alternative revenue stream suggestions from anyone. As someone who is a gen-oo-ine professional writer, what's your take on it? Things like Creative Commons licenses, such as i have on the blog, they don't solve the issue of being deprived of revenue when one wants to make money of one's work. Do you think the Take One Free, Buy The Rest model would work for writers who want to use the web to market their stuff? As in putting out one free story as an appetiser for a collection that's available free? Or Stephen King's attempt of a chapter-a-time, with a dollar buying you the next, would that work?
The problem there, i think, is that there's still no easy way to stop someone from passing on work they have bought.

And the patient Manjula wrote back:

Ah the trials of being an h'author!! Yep. Well, the logical analog of musicians being paid to do live tours is for authors being paid to do live readings, while their books are available 'free.'
But the problem with both fields of creativity is this: by cutting off revenues to the agencies that make the work available to the public, i.e., the publishing and recording companies, the public is the ultimate loser! Because the publishing/recording companies, working entirely under the impetus of personal gain and greed have nevertheless created a situation where there is more literature and music available to the mass of humanity than ever before.

And you, Gentle Reader, what do you think?

Highway Bloggery

Friends, advertising people and activists - especially all you technophobes - here's an absolutely wonderful concept i'd like to point you towards. It will get you a much larger audience than, for example, this blog would. But then, so would the sound of one hand clapping. Anyway, "Apart from actual prisoners, you won't find a more captive audience than people in their cars," the site says, and goes on to explain: "Here's what you do: 1) Put paint on cardboard 2) Put cardboard on freeway 3) Repeat"
Now hie thee to FreewayBlogger.com and check out the wonderful examples they have up there. And if you're considering doing a little lo-tech blogging yourself, do check out their "How To" page.
[P.S. Where are our manners? Thanks for the link, Roma.]

In which we continue to drop names

For once, this blog's claims about moving in august circles can be substantiated. Just after we read Nina's article, which we blogged a couple of posts ago, and mentioned Manjula's play, we also found a link to a lovely piece by another of our buddies, Nilanjana Roy, reminiscing about bookshops she has known, starting with her First Independent Purchase (we are much older and cannot remember that far back in our own life).

How most people mark the passage from childhood into adulthood, I do not know; I marked it by my first solo visit to a bookshop, unaccompanied by adults who would tell me what to buy, clutching a few notes that represented my first ever earnings.
...
It began badly, with the lady at the counter suggesting the What Katy Did books. My diffidence disappeared in the face of what I saw as a slight. “Oh, I’ve read all of those ages ago—when I was small,” I said loftily. She didn’t allow even the flicker of a smile to cross her face.
Instead she led me deftly into a discussion of reading, cross-examined me subtly, and produced Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with expert judgement. I still have my copy; ragged, dog-eared, sadly tatty, but then it’s the first book I devoured as a paying adult.

Nilanjana goes on to mourn the imminent demise of one of her favourite bookstores.

What is it with our cities? We permit the sale of underwear strung on funny shaped coathangers on railway pedestrian overbridges, we allow rip-off electronic goods to be sold on the footpaths of our busiest business districts, but we're closing down booksellers? We can feel a rant coming on, but we're tired. Here, you go read the rest of the piece.

What? It is August? Never mind.

The road of books

Large sections of our bookshelves originally came from the pavement book sellers that line the roads between Fountain and Churchgate, dating back from college days, when we couldn't even afford Mr Shanbagh's famous standard discounts at Strand.
The books we own that we didn't buy there were all gifts, or purchased from the not-so-well-known New & Secondhand at Dhobi Talao - cramped, stuffy, dim and oh so wonderful. Despite the space constraints (if you were between two shelves and someone wanted to pass, you had to come all the way out, and no, we were much less wide then, so it's not that), the management encouraged browsing. Which, when you love books and the twenty rupees in your pocket is your allowance for the whole month, is a Very Good Thing. Many happy hours were spent scouring the shelves, lifting down entire piles of books and dipping through every one, weighing the merits of a matinee show against a hardcover Wodehouse.
Books are still our only real vice and extravagance - we're ignoring the weed here - and Bombay now has almost as many spacious, well-lit, A/Ced mega-bookstores as it has bowling alleys. Most of them are browsing-friendly, and we have spent many happy hours at them, ambling down the aisles, sipping here and there, and buying NEW books that are packed into large carry-bags with the store's name on them. We mark our calendar with the big book sales, where, in the past, we have staggered out weighed down with an entire backseat's worth of books, and discounts notwithstanding, having spent at least three times what we meant to when we went in.
But we still like to spend time at N&S when we're in the area, and frequently plan our rare town trips so that we get an hour or two to stroll down Fountain way and replenish the trusty haversack. So we shed a tear and are moved to a longer post than normal when we read in today's TOI (wonders will never cease, more book news in the TOI) that those pavement stalls may soon be a thing of the past. "Veer Nariman Road ... has been identified as a no-hawking zone under the BMC's hawking plan for the city."
The ray of hope is in what happened to Fashion Street. When the authorities cleared the clothes vendors off the pavement near the museum, they were relocated en masse to the sidewalk near Cross Maidan. Hopefully, the booksellers will, at worst, meet a similar fate. We suggest the inner pavement of Marine Drive. We'd also like to personally invite them to our favourite road in the entire extended metropolis, Palm Beach Road, just a ten-minute cycle ride away from this keyboard.

The Old Lady of Boribunder, has she started reading again?

Very unusual week at the TOI it was. There was actually a full page on the arts in Bombay Times, of all places. An interview (well, five full questions) with Manjula Padmanabhan, another with Naseeruddin Shah, and we forget what else (put it down to shock) and their utterly pathetic search doesn't help either.
And then on Sunday, Men & Women, that extended Page 3 glossy that Sunday Review had morphed into, had a front page feature on books. In Book, line and stinker, our pal Nina Martyris writes on biography in India: "In a very basic way there seems to be a parallel between the kind of jounalism practised in India and the biographic material published – both allow public figures to keep their private lives private. [...] [Except for] scurrilous film biographies. Unauthorised biographies on popular icons like Madhubala and Meena Kumari, who can't defend themselves because they are dead, are in keeping with the tradition of unsavoury film journalism which inspires them. But far worse are the authorised ones, of film stars, business barons and religious heads, which take sychophancy to depths that haven't been plumbed before."

Let's see: tapping the female, check; extending and vibrating a wing, check; singing - ah, that's where we go wrong.

Fruit flies and humans are similar in their genetic makeup so Baker and his colleagues question whether genes that control sexuality in fruit flies could have a similar role in humans.
"If you look at the basics of fly behavior, you find an innate ability to recognize somebody who is the right species and is the right sex," said Baker.
"You tap them and get their attention, you play them a love song and so on. So the basic rudiments are pretty similar to what people do to get successful mating and produce an offspring."

Scientists, in the course of messing around with fruit fly genes, believe they have isolated the cells that control male mating behaviour. Apparently when they interfered with those nerve cells, male fruit flies neglected the fine courtesies, which involve, among other things, tapping, some snappy wing action, and singing (flies sing? we thought they just hummed.), and of course the flowers and the compliments, and tried to do everything at once. Net result: Male fruit fly's fly stays zipped.

Better safe than sari.

A little Beeb tells us that weavers in Varanasi rub condoms - state issue if they can get them - on their looms' shuttles, to soften them, thereby speeding up the weaving process. Feel free to add your alternate headlines in the comments box.
Also in the same article, these, er, unorthodox uses for condoms.

Villagers use them to carry water when working in fields
For waterproofing ceilings: condoms are spread under the cement-concrete mortar
Can be mixed with tar and concrete to give a smooth finish to roads
Can be placed over the ends of guns to protect them in desert sandstorms
Drugs 'mules' swallow condoms filled with drugs to smuggle them across borders