Despite being in Mrs A’s reading list from college and his turning up (often tucked away into uncanny corners) in commercial bookshelves everywhere, I’d delayed picking an Oliver Sacks book up, thinking I’ll find one in a library someday or technically ‘borrow’ one. Vintage Sacks is from SPLRC (of the DiceyDewey’s fame). Sacks makes chemistry (of the trivalent-bond-and-isotopes kind) feel deeply personal. (The chapter is titled Stinks and Bangs.) I wish chemistry textbooks from my literature-starved hostel years were written with such love and sense of adventure. In twenty-twenty-perfect-hindsight, I think the textbooks (the NCERT ones in two-colour offset [1]) took things too seriously and forgot test-tubes over bunsen burners were also supposed to be fun in mysterious ways. (This is a well […ish] description of Sacks’s description of test-tubes-over-bunsen-burners.)
I’m about to head to Vijayawada for a re-run (hardly; same river, not twice, all that) of the typography course and think this divine-ish intervention calls for a much more end-products-unknown approach for it to balance out the dashes-dots-spaces-pedantry.
In an excerpt from Uncle Tungsten, Sacks footnotes Euler’s thoughts on lights, colours and (inevitably) music.
The nature of the radiation by which we see an opaque object does not depend on the source of light but on the vibratory motion of the very small particles [atoms] of the object’s surface. These little particles are like stretched strings, tuned to a certain frequency, which vibrate in response to a similar vibration of the air even if no one plucks them. Just as the stretched string is excited by the same sound that it emits, the particles of the surface begin to vibrate in tune with the incident radiation and to emit their own waves in every direction.
I’m so going to find a way to shoehorn that into a lesson on the black-on-white-and-readallover typography landscape.
1: Their managing science textbook diagrams with just two colours (often a sedate palette at that) wasn’t particularly amusing then. Wish I could say I was entranced, etc., but in reality, I was stuck SunTzu-ing my way to entrance exams like almost everyone else.
Once you get over the SPLRC-C librarians’ own P2C2E way of dealing with Dewey’s Decimals, and one in every ten books with a live moth eating Rorschach patterns into its innards as you grapple with the expertly repurposed cardboard box for a cover, the shelves start to proffer gems like ‘Tower of Birds’ every other time you decide to drop by for new books.
Printed in 1989 by the USSR-state-owned Raduga (Rainbow) Publishers, Tower of Birds was an unexpected (as all things chanced upon at SPLRC-C tend to be) find that turned out to be full of sedate, often quirky tales of man versus (not really) the super- and otherwise natural. ‘The Piano Tuner’—the first, seventeen-page story by Viktor Kolupayev[1]—reminded me of Schickler’s short ‘The Smoker’ and set expectations just right. (A certain somebody may have scanned the pages if you can’t find a copy somewhere.)
For a chance find, the stories were appropriately overwhelming. That (alone) is not what made me fall in love with the book though. For a book that tiny (from an L*W point of view, not from a thickness one), it is produced with attention lavished to details most others would consider ripe for cost-cutting. (It is perhaps a Russian culture-thing and I am attributing great intent to it.) The book’s text-block is printed in black, except for the page numbers in green. That is a major oddity when nothing else of note—neither the titles nor the book’s half-title—is printed with the same green ink. The margins are lavish for such a small page size; you never run out of thumb-room as you fight the undulations of a packed state-bus over half-full potholes. One other thing that reminds you of potholes is the terrible justification; seven words per column is a recipe for major waterways in the text-block.[2] The colophon credits the designer[3] appropriately and does not make that seem an afterthought. The signatures are numbered (this is not the norm, even for Raduga’s own books I checked later at the library) for some reason. I don’t see that information being useful to anyone other than perhaps the book binding machine. To top things off in true socialist fashion, there is an honest appeal to the readers to share their comments on the book, at the very end.
Edit: Look at that contents page! It is beautifully—if a bit awkwardly around P278—typeset with one font at one size and two styles. Outside of a classroom, I’m a sucker for the one-face-one-size technique. Sadly, it lacks true italics (and oldstyle numerals, if we are at it) and the tabulation is a bit wonky, but its heart is in the right place.
If this is/was propaganda, this is propaganda well-made.
1: Kolupayev was a Mathematician/Bionicist(?) before he started writing SF at the age of 33.
2: The choice of type and the setting positively sucks, if you’re pixel-peeping. I guess the stories and the intent cloud my judgement.
3: Look for Gukova’s foldout books on the website.
The heart doesn’t say tick-tock. In truth, the heart says very little. Lub-dub in the textbook, dhak-dhak in the poet’s aphorism, But mostly it’s quiet. I count beats only when they are missing, but mostly I try to notice even though I’m listening, all the time.
— Saranya Manivannan (Introduction to Preeti Vangani’s The Other Side of Loneliness)
Most people choose their commuting method by default—they use a car because everyone else does where they live, or they use a train or bus because that’s what’s available to them. Cyclists on the other hand tend to commute by bicycle because we enjoy it, which means we’re already predisposed to becoming benevolent commuters since we already understand the potential for our commute to bring us happiness.
കുഞ്ഞുണ്ണിയെ തനിയെ വിട്ടുകൊണ്ട് നിർമ്മലാനന്ദൻ ആശ്രമത്തിലേയ്ക്കു നടന്നു. കാട്ടുചെടികളുടെ മേൽ കുഞ്ഞുണ്ണി കുനിഞ്ഞു. അവ തങ്ങളുടെ കടയ്ക്കൽ വളർന്ന പുല്ലുകളിലേയ്ക്കു ചൂണ്ടിക്കാട്ടി. പുല്ലുകൾ തങ്ങളുടെ കടയ്ക്കലേയ്ക്കു ചൂണ്ടിക്കാട്ടി. അവിടെ അവിശ്രമം പാഞ്ഞു നടന്ന ചെറുചാതികളെ കുഞ്ഞുണ്ണി കണ്ടു. ജ്വലിക്കുന്ന നിറങ്ങൾ, ശില്പ സങ്കീർണതയാർന്ന കൊമ്പും കിരീടവും. ഇവരെവിടെ പോകുന്നു? അവസാനിയ്ക്കാത്ത യാത്ര. പുറംതോടിന്റെ ഭാരങ്ങൾ. പുല്ലിന്റെ ഉപനിഷത്ത് ഏറ്റുവാങ്ങാനായി കുഞ്ഞുണ്ണി മണ്ണിലിരുന്നു. യാത്രയല്ല, പ്രാണഭയമിയന്ന പലായനമാണ്; ചാതികൾ ഒന്ന് മറ്റൊന്നിനെ നായാടുകയാണ്. മുക്തിധാമിന്റെ അശാന്തി! കുഞ്ഞുണ്ണിയുടെ മുമ്പിൽ പുൽക്കടയ്ക്കലെ യുദ്ധം ഒരപാരദൃശ്യമായി. സഞ്ജയാ, കുഞ്ഞുണ്ണി പറഞ്ഞു, അങ്ങ് ഒരന്ധന് കാണിച്ചു കൊടുത്ത യുദ്ധത്തിന്റെ ചിത്രം ഇതിന്റെ മുമ്പിൽ തുച്ഛമായിത്തീരുന്നല്ലോ. ഇപ്പോൾ കുഞ്ഞുണ്ണി ആ ചെറുചാതികളിലൊന്നിനകത്തേയ്ക്കു നോക്കി, അതിന്റെ ജൈവസ്ഥലങ്ങളിൽ കറങ്ങിത്തിരിയുന്ന എണ്ണമറ്റ സൗരമണ്ഡലങ്ങളെ കുഞ്ഞുണ്ണി കണ്ടു. ചാതിയുടെ ചോരയ്ക്കകത്ത് അതിന്റെ പുഴയോരങ്ങളിലിരുന്നുകൊണ്ട്, വരാഹമിഹിരന്മാർ ആ സൗരമണ്ഡലങ്ങളുടെ ഗതികൾ ഗണിച്ച് ഏതോ പരമാണു ഗോത്രങ്ങളുടെ ജാതകങ്ങളെഴുതി.
In one’s own garden one has, in the end, only oneself to satisfy. I have had to remember that I have been making other people’s gardens and that the garden must be theirs. People’s wishes and hopes and requirements are contributory factors just like a clay soil, an oak wood, or lack of water. Where I have worked well the garden will be content to be itself and bear no obvious label.
To go a stage further; where does style start? Style for the garden designer means to assemble all the physical elements of a garden scene, to blend them into a coherent whole and to imbue this whole with all the intensity or, perhaps I should say “intelligence” that he can muster, so that the whole may have a quality peculiar to itself. Such style must be contemporary since, if a composition has style, it must reflect its maker’s intention and its maker is necessarily of his own day, even though he may have chosen to give his garden an idiom derived from another place or another century. Here I would like to differentiate between real style and the eclectic use of a style borrowed from another period or another place. This will be a reflected mannerism deliberately imposed: a kind of design, a way of planting, selection of material, which belongs to that period or a place.
[…]
The tensions of modern life and an entire change in our ideas of scale and of speed have made physical tranquillity a luxury. Repose has become a rarity; we may well begin to accumulate and arrange the attributes of rest like stamps or sculpture. The idea of rest seems to be found increasingly in a no man’s land between house and garden. More and more the idea “garden” invades the house, or the house roof spreads out to include the garden.
— Russell Page, The Education of A Gardener
From the two-dimensions of a roughly sketched pencil-on-paper plan to the three- and four-dimensions of plants growing over time, gardening—perhaps too easily—parallels the practice of design (more in a wrote-an-entrance-exam-to-get-into-an-expensive-education-of sense than the scheme-of-things-that-could-be sense). Yet, I am pleasantly surprised to find such fundamental application-level (fun words, put together, those) wisdom so early into the book. Then again, these are—perhaps—not answers, but—in the spirit of the book—seeds for the answers to sprout forth in time. The parallelism has gone too far. (Risky, pointless click. Don’t.) Then again, “Narcotics, like gardening, is a dirty business.” Not sorry. Non sequiturs.
If—on the off-chance—you were hungry for more unfuunny-slash-forced connections, the quote quoted is gardened; one more sentence at either end and it starts to dull like an overgrown patch of grass in an unkempt zen garden.
This above reminds me of the opening chapter from Way back to Nature where Fukuoka discusses the idea of conducting a symphony as a parallel to farming and keeps it aside.
Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between “Jane (whom I adore)” and “Jane, whom I adore,” and the difference between them both and “Jane—whom I adore—” marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place,” in Isaac Babel’s lovely words; a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart. Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods.
Some metabook-books I think are worth their weight in paper pulp laced with gold during the great Kerala wedding season: Kalpetta Narayanan Master’s Kayar Murukukayaanu (The Noose tightens) on books, people, places etc., and Kavithayute Jeevacharitram (The Biography of a Poem) on po-etry and -ets; Nilanjana Roy’s The Girl Who Ate Books; Neil Gaiman’s View from the Cheap Seats on people with books in them; Browse: Love Letters to bookshops Around the World edited by Henry Hitchings on places with books in them; Eco-and-Carriere’s This is Not the End of the Book where they talk about the book object; Kavitha Rao’s The Librarian with a girl who goes to work in a large library in Bombay; Stephen King’s On Writing; Yoda Press’s weird collection of imaginary libraries in Invisible Libraries; Phil Baines’s Penguin by Design, on book covers and the people and places that make them; Nick Hornby’s Stuff I Have Been Reading with a self explaining title; Pradeep Sebastian’s witty and relatable Groaning Shelf on book people and book places; P.K. Rajashekharan’s book memories in Bookstalgia (not as fun as Kalpetta; the title is what sells it). The list is defined by the length of my scan-bed; off-screen, working as props and caught in a Kindle are Seven Hundred Penguins, David Lodge’s Lives in Writing, Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, etc.
Up-hoot #1: Found Love Among the Bookshelves today at the State Public Library (this, of the dust-jacketed—not the just-jacketed—kind.) Too many book-related coincidences this week.
