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A Little History Of Discovery

Discussion in 'Book Lovers' started by Ouroboros, Sep 24, 2018.

  1. Ouroboros

    Ouroboros Silver IL'ite

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    One more for you:

    Why did Shah Jahan commission a duck-pommelled sword rather than a more fierce-looking sword?
    Boggles me! My Indian History as such is shabby.

    upload_2018-9-26_12-22-16.png
     
  2. Ouroboros

    Ouroboros Silver IL'ite

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    Cheeniya, Terry Pratchett rings in hilarious metaphors to describe personalities.

    In his "Fifth Elephant" book, he wrote, "All Jolson was a man who'd show up on an atlas and change the orbit of small planets".

    Similarly, Mr Kubrick showed up on celluloid atlas and toppled the landscape of motion pictures with his resounding and extravagant productions. Join him with Peter Sellers and the small planets fly away skittish in that collaboration. There is no atlas remaining in that supernova of creative assemblage. I love Dr Strangelove!

    I am not kidding when I emphasize playfully that it creates a colossal difference in a kid's life when exposed to good literature, artwork, and entertainment right through the childhood. Hence I have a tinge of doleful and incessant voice in my writing that had I known of the importance of sensible and wide-ranging education (Lewis Thomas, Hoffmann, Mencken, Nietzsche, Grayling etc.) much earlier in life, I would have averted even that minuscule angst in my teens. If there is one thing I could change in my life then it is to have had the friends I have today (including you) with competent sensibilities through my formative years who would have forced these masterful works upon me. You seek answers, read them.

    Well, Kubrick deserves a strange and baffling rumination.
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2018
  3. Ouroboros

    Ouroboros Silver IL'ite

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    Vocabulary in novels

    While reading a book, I stumbled on the construct "lapidating the adulteress".

    A niche utterance for murky activity. I have never heard of that lapidate before in any news report to denote the barbaric act of stoning someone to grievous injury.

    It is always "stoning the adulteress", but here it was "lapidating the adulteress" in that book.

    Is lapidate(v) too pretentious, or scholarly, or too technical? Would you in general parlance, whilst sipping tea casually, text someone that you just read about a fictional account of a gruesome lapidating in a novel despite the frantic auto-correct bot trying to hint: 'Did you mean dilapidated?' Would you? But there is a precise word for the act, still it sounds flamboyant.

    Few days ago, I chanced on a rich-sounding and inquisitive word in another book: 'hamartia'.

    Hamartia, also called tragic flaw, (hamartia from Greek hamartanein, “to err”), inherent defect or shortcoming in the hero of a tragedy, who is in other respects a superior being favoured by fortune. Aristotle introduced the term casually in the Poetics in describing the tragic hero as a man of noble rank and nature whose misfortune is not brought about by villainy but by some “error of judgment” (hamartia). This imperfection later came to be interpreted as a moral flaw, such as Othello’s jealousy or Hamlet’s irresolution, although most great tragedies defy such a simple interpretation.

    Would you startle your timid friend that you have gained insight into his hamartia now. The frightened creature may change the password of his account for world of warcraft game.

    There is nothing obnoxious in the usage of these meaty words, but in the flow of speech, these words jutted out inharmonious as if the writer just learnt of them a while ago and was eager to wield them in his writing, like I most often do, therefore he had the work cut out for you, that is made it unnecessarily challenging, with nil value in that unsophisticated context, like I have learnt the idiom 'have one's work cut out for one" a minute ago and purposely used it with no heed to any consonance in such a long and non-lapidary sentence.
     
  4. Ouroboros

    Ouroboros Silver IL'ite

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    6: The Fifth Elephant

    One book to salvage while marooned on a remote island? Up until last month it was the aptly named Hitchhiker's Galaxy but from this month it is any Discworld book of Terry Pratchett.

    A while ago, my ears bled from prevalence when fans swooned over Terry's writing. I hardly read his works but had heard abundant about him. The fans would belt out ga-ga and gee-gee over this satirical writing. I was confused why Discworld didn't appeal to me though I strained myself to read the first in the series, Color of Magic, several times. I finally gave up. I found the book neither funny nor gripping, as touted.

    Last month, on a whim, I picked up Mort in Discworld series from the library. Since then no looking back. I consumed a book after another. A curious mind can be initiated into the madness of Discworld through any standalone book in the series regardless of the published chronology. However, the secret to unlock the madness in this imaginary world supported on the back of four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle called Great A'Tuin is to embark through a slightly better assimilating book. Mort and Small Gods are good choices to start with.

    If you are in pain or pleasure, if you are confused or content, if you eat rutabaga or rarebit, if you are human or dwarf or troll or werewolf or magus, a book that fits all your reading requirement is Discworld. Just bring in your sense of humor to read the book.

    Last night I read "Fifth Elephant". I never highlight passages in a Discworld book as the whole book is a comedy act and you cannot tease out prized dialogues. It is a laughing riot.

    upload_2018-9-26_17-29-51.png

    They say that the fifth elephant came screaming and trumpeting through the atmosphere of the young world all those years ago and landed hard enough to split continents and raise mountains. No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical question: when millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there is no one to hear it, does it – philosophically speaking – make a noise? And if there was no one to see it hit, did it actually hit?

    Vogons have been displaced by the Morporkians as my fancied tribe on reading The Fifth Elephant. What Terry spins in each book in the series is uniquely brilliant that many accomplished writers could not recreate in their entire opus. Now I know why fans swoon in a dithyrambic ga-ga and gee-gee over this writing.
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2018
  5. Ouroboros

    Ouroboros Silver IL'ite

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    I am miffed by the resurgence of forwards/shares on social media that communicate virtuous indulgence of women. I assumed it was passe in today's pragmatic and egalitarian household where women are not merely identified for their nurturistic instincts.

    A typical forward goes something like this:

    A woman wakes up at five in the morning and heats the tava to prepare dosa for her husband, <followed by several bone-crunching tasks, and ending with,> please salute this honor and nobility and compassion called a 'woman' who is the lamp and salt and coconut and kerosene of the household. Without this altruistic engine the domestic rail ki patri is messed up.

    I am puzzled.

    Why should this multitasking woman be saluted?

    Let's construct a simple case study of Mrs Lajwanti and Mrs Lanka.

    Mrs Lajwanti is the embodiment of feminine outpour. After getting married to Mr Lajwanti, she moved out of the city. Every day she wakes up at 5 AM and busies herself in concocting three types of chutneys and two types of dosas for her beloved and caring husband. She also ensures that the ghee is timely warmed as Mr Lajwanti shufflingly occupies the chair at the breakfast table laid out with freshly cut marigolds. On the other hand Mrs Lanka, who too moved out of the city after marriage leaving behind her parents, coaxed her husband to eat breakfast at his office canteen and wakes up lazily at 9 AM just in time to catch up with the Jimmy Fallon Show. Given all other circumstances in their respective marriages are the same, is Mrs Lajwanti to be accredited more than Mrs Lanka?

    Why are forwards and rifle-salutes only for Mrs Lajwanti? Lajwanti has unmindfully created a problem and triumphed over it whereas Mrs Lanka has thoughtfully eliminated the problem. The former is nobler and the latter is wiser. Quaint stripes and aggressively eulogizing forwards on the former beats me. We are living in an epoch where prudence surpasses sentimentality. Women who labour to their created whim are definitely praiseworthy in that they are still resourceful in problem-solving their own engineered problems. These enthusiastic women forage for ideas on eager fermentation, buy an innovative gadget to ferment the batter, one more to lock in the flavour, study the rules and tips for crispy dosas and accomplish the task of serving udipi dosa to her molly-coddled husband and scream hurray. It is all very charming! But what about Mrs Lanka? Is she less resourceful or less innovating in foregoing such pains and weaning her husband off such expectation from a wife. Why are there no paeans and banners for this liberated and noncommittal woman?

    I wish to receive more forwards on this ingenious and self-serving woman rather than the self-sacrificing goddess of domestic bliss. After all Jimmy Fallon is a show not to be missed for a peck or a pat over a dosa.
     
    Last edited: Sep 27, 2018
  6. Ouroboros

    Ouroboros Silver IL'ite

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    Dear Rakhii,

    I dread to answer it straight — what are you reading lately. I am overwhelmingly excited about every dud book hence wary of proselytizing too much carried away in a raving march to convert the confused to my tastes and diffusive reads. Again, few books I read, few I flip, few I scribble notes, and the rest I am happy to know of their existence like "The Coddling of the American Mind" by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt which I found out about only this morning.

    First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.


    Having chatted with you intermittently, I sense you as someone cosmopolitan in values. Must confess that I find you intriguing. In the sense, you are not (piercingly) rhetoric and (blah-blah) claptrap but a responsible and accommodating thinker based on our conversations. A quirky balance of being endearing and earnest, at the same time! You could flatter, but you don't. You could blarney your way into anything but you simply exchange as an observation. I enjoyed the way you have put your latent and mutual affection as "don't login to tell you that".

    I too shudder to think what I would have missed if I hadn't been rewired three years ago to set forth on this adventure to discover books.

    Back to your book query, there are incidental books (cited, referenced, recommended) that I have only heard of but have not got the chance to examine. Worth mentioning is this book of much delight that caught my eye yesterday: At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime by Roger Ekrich.

    You too may find it fascinating just to know that someone researched and unearthed forgotten antics on this fragmented nighttime.

    His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

    The book's most fascinating revelation is that our pre-industrial ancestors experienced what Ekirch calls "segmented sleep": there was "first sleep" until midnight, then a "second sleep". In between, they tended the fire, read or talked, had sex, smoked and meditated on the events of the previous day. Electric lighting has altered our sleep patterns and robbed us of this nocturnal hiatus.

    Alas, only if time could stretch to a few more extra hours in the night, then I would have read this book.

    Keep in touch. Wave or walk by when you feel like.
     
  7. Amulet

    Amulet IL Hall of Fame

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    I know Mrs. Lajwani. She is the one who has all those youtube videos of recipes, and procedures. She always says "subscribe, comment, link, and share". We can see that she had monetized her exhibitionism.

    That Mrs. Lanka, I don't know her. She watches Fallon, who had fallen behind Colbert in ratings at the same time slot. This Mrs. Lanka suffers hamartia, of two kinds: having poor Mr. L eat in the office canteen every working day, and choosing Fallon over Colbert.

    Two questions:
    1. What is the breakfast plan on weekend mornings at the Lanka household ?
    2. How is lapidating connected to lapidary ?

    You read such a lot:astonished:. (I watch TV) I am almost tempted to paste a photo of a dosa on this. But I remember that Adi didn't want any of that sort of thing, ie., food pictures, in this space.
     
  8. Ouroboros

    Ouroboros Silver IL'ite

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    Two plaits suit you. Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics said something about spectrum, extremes, vice and virtue, twin-faced and double-edge sword.Regardless two plaits embody your frivolity and formidability.

    I also suspect Mrs Lajwanti has those oompa loompas on her payroll who fabricate such nauseating forwards on domestic virtues. The monetizing via youtube is only nominal what with brand endorsement of tava that Mrs Lajwanti so caressingly pulls out of the drawer to prepare those dosas for her potbellied husband.

    You have lightning grasp far better than the lightning cable touted by Apple Inc. to perceive hamartia in even an unexceptional gag. Choosing Fallon over Colbert is a consummate hamartia which would probably lead to irrecoverable distortion in her political sensibilities.

    1. Weekends are no different from weekdays. Mrs Lanka would not tinker with this disciplined routine in which the husband is brutalized to desire the canteen food. Both together go to the canteen in solidarity on weekends to uphold the rights of a lapsed wife.
    2. Via Lapis Lazuli

    No, no, Adi is strict this time on focus. No food. No dry fruits. Not even soda. But for you I might manage to get dispensation only on dosa, the defining labour that separates Mrs Lajwanti from Mrs Lanka.

    Two plaits suit you much!
     
  9. Ouroboros

    Ouroboros Silver IL'ite

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    You underestimate me. I am foremost a tv person, then, occasionally pretend to have read books.

    In the recent times, two documentaries on Amazon Prime impressed me: Hermitage Masterpieces and Religions of the World (narrated by Ben Kingsley).

    Though the former is on art and the latter on religion, they both are primarily on history, the making of art and the making of the religions of the world. Every time I watch an intriguing show, I wonder ...there is a before me (unresolved) and the after me (apercu or nirvana struck me) on watching the show. Every one is endowed with that Locke's tabula rasa and we establish our cosmic cred, like the street cred, of our perception of existence onto that blank slate. I synthesize my heuristical doctrine from these tv shows more than books.

    One day I would like to walk into a market place and randomly inquire from sweet-looking faces about their cosmic cred and compare how a person who had read the works of Ramban is different from a person who had read Ramayana or how a person who had watched Dark is different from a person who had watched Glitch. By mid-age, everyone scratches some personal findings onto that tabula rasa and claims to have discovered the true essence of living. I too feel I figured it all out about life by now. Now I am aroused how others fared in their investigation of the enigma of life and how different their slate is to mine. How could they know anything about life or reconciled with the interactive voices not having watched Hermitage Masterpieces and Religions of the World in an insightful and life-affirming exertion. That way I am presumptuous of my unassailable taste in documentaries/tv.
     
    Last edited: Sep 27, 2018
  10. Ouroboros

    Ouroboros Silver IL'ite

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    7: Fates and Furies

    In line with the spirit of the discovery, and not necessarily books completed, that I had mentioned in the first post, I would like to bring to your notice a book I found very perplexing. Yesterday, I decided to read "Fates and Furies" by Lauren Groff, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2015, and was favored by Barack Obama.

    upload_2018-9-28_9-54-51.png
    The novel opened with a very Edward Bulwer-Lytton setting:

    A THICK DRIZZLE from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping. The seabirds stopped their tuning, the ocean went mute. Houselights over the water dimmed to gray.

    Curtain's sudden sweeping?
    Ocean went mute?

    Less than a page later:

    hid the key under the hawksbill turtle carapace in the garden. A house of tartan and Liberty print and Fiestaware, thick with dust; the guest room with the lighthouse’s triple blink in the night, the craggy

    What is happening here? The prose is densely turgid with intrusive modifiers at every sequence like a set piece. I plowed some more, halted, and quickly scanned the reviews on Amazon. The reviewers moaned about the flowery and pretentious language. You flip through ten pages to discover one worthwhile page of matter amidst nine pages of fluffy void. I was pleased to have found other kindred readers who were aghast at the recognition of this purple prose. Many abandoned the book partway, as I did too last night, unable to withstand the bloated narrative.

    Why did Obama recommend this book? Did he campaign to protect the endangered hawksbill turtle or lead us to fiestware. I have no clue. I closed the sweeping curtain on the eighth page of the book and vowed never to return to this inflated work again.
     
    Last edited: Sep 28, 2018

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