B-Log

Sic of Fiction Recently I met a sic in a book of fiction. In Donan Tartt's The Goldfinch. That has set me thinking. What is a sic doing in a text of fiction? Especially the said fiction which doesn't open with the jaded apology that this is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person dead or alive is only incidental. A sic is a certifier of an error. It is an apology for committing an error. One makes oneself clear that the person who is committing the error is aware of the fact that it is thus but is committing the same as it was already committed by another. Hence a sic is not an acknowledgement of ones error but an acknowledgement of re-presenting an error made by another person or even a source. "Sic is short for Sicut, a Latin word which, for those familiar with Latin choral works, crops up in Sicut erat in principio... or 'As it was in the beginning'. So it basically means Like that. It's used when quoting something with a spelling mistake...

The Bullfinch Donna Tartt 2014 Abacus After two false starts, I am done with The Bullfinch, the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. The rather voluminous, in fact 864 pages in the paperback edition, book yielded to me when I was tuck with a digital disconnect for a period of four days. That did the trick. Though a good work, somehow, I felt, it called for an enforced freeze of some kind so that time will yield to it. Perhaps that summarises what I consider to be the problem with the book too. It is a good novel with sloughs of despondency and isles of enchantment, more isles and less the ponds of depression. The reader, like Bunyan's Christian, can progress in his pilgrimage after fighting off a series of temptations, which includes the not so charitable urge to put it down and move off! It was hard to agree with all the eulogies the blurb heaped on it, but equally painful not to, at times. The narrative with its epic sweep revolves around the  life of Theodore Decker, ...

It has become common place to confess. It is worth searching since when the turn to confession as a viable form of marketing was born. Initially it was a sincere attempt on the part of the Motor Vehicle manufacturers to put a wrong right. When the benefit hind sight affords the manufacturers to spot a defect in the architecture or a part of it, the company recalls a batch of products to address the defect. But going by the current spike in the rate of recalls, one suspects a movement which is more commercial in nature. Are there actual defects which prompt the recall of thousands of vehicles? Or are the defects deliberately manufactured? Something which could be routinely corrected in a periodic service, are these being blown out of proportions so that the company's profile could be uplifted? Are the motor vehicle manufacturers too hitchhiking on the confession bandwagon? Confess to sell. Confess without criming and sell. Confession as a market gimmick.  What if the scenari...

Everyone likes a good hanging, do they? Tag lines sell articles. An advertising tag line can tease in  a peculiar kind of charm to the product it is meant to promote. Like 'when beauty meets quality', or when 'make. believe', makes the reader or viewer cogitate on the unspoken experience of living the product. When the looks of the product which is necessarily made to look other than what it really is attempts to mate the hyper-expressive language tinkered to do just that, the customer is made to willingly savour the illicit passions of the unsaid. The desire for the material fingers the linguistic foreplay and the killing feel to have it, know it rises inside. The ad line adds much in terms of the unstated, hooks one closer but leaves the distance untraveled, yet approximated.  But do books require these tag lines? A subtitle like tag line which supplements the text's argument at one level and mystifies it at another? A teaser which pokes the intellectua...

Reading Dickinson in the Bare All Age A major point of debate at present among the trend watchers is the rising tendency to bare it all. The long existed fencing which respected the division between private and the public has been punched into a sieve. A sieve which permits uninhibited flow two ways. The flow has unproblematised the two categories which we have always attempted to keep apart: the private and the public. With the advent of the so christened social media, the life inside had begun to take a beating. With a decade of social media behind us, the beating it took has totally deshaped the private space. With result that not only has the private shrunk to the real inside of the mind, with the physical and lived part of the life has become public. When the expansionist agenda of the public pushes mercilessly forward, aided by the unashamedly openness seeking social media, the outcome can't be otherwise.  It hardly matters what Emily Dickinson thought. Keeping asi...

Jagathi Sreekumar, the actor has retired for the time being. A motor accident has wrecked havoc with his mind. He has travelled beyond the din of the actual into a calm of the within. He goes through the motions. Let us hope that there will be more light at the end of the tunnel, that the comedian nonpareil for the Malayalees will return us to quality laughter.  Quality laughter is a complex term, as it is a slippery feel. if humour is the process and laughter the product, as the theorists say, then quality laughter must be the result of quality humour.  The blank which Jagathy has left behind is a yawning divide in the lives of the average Keralite who loved a good laugh, but rarely at the expense of the female of the species. The miss of the real is felt when we have to live with the kind of replacements which have materialised in the guise of comedians. When the quintessential humour gives way to pedestrian buffoonery, pathos of the viewer bring the m...

Ads have ad-on value. Or they should. Considering the quantum of time of a television viewer or a magazine reader that ads snatch away, it should have. The other day exigency tied me down to a channel. Having left the remote kilometres away, forgetfulness turns the clock back by a decade kind of. Since mobility has been mortgaged to the couch potato pleasure, there was the unease of having to get up to escape ads. Rooted to the comfort of the visually sedated, I was exposed to forgettable ads which were, to add to the insult, repeated. One ad paraded an experiment. A washing competition in which a surf Excel wins hands down. An ad which makes one take a look at the calendar to check the century one belongs to! Another one had three creams from three countries and the the one for which the ad is made won it lock, stock and barrel. These were repeated twice or thrice during each break. For a viewer who is already taxed by the effort having to watch a movie which stretches the limits...