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