Metaphors - Mixed, Sustained and Unexpected

I first came across the phrase Guitar God when it was used to describe Eric Clapton and it struck a chord in me (pun intended:)). Eric Clapton is number two in Rolling Stones list of greatest guitarists of all time and if you listen to him enough, you will understand why!

I am Hindu by religion and we are used to having multiple Gods. Heck! Each of us even invent some of our own Gods. It is even conceivable that at some point in time, there were more Gods (and demons) than humans, for, aren't all humans just Gods that have fallen from grace or demons who have stepped up?

And I think that I have all sorts of Gods in my life: I have guitar Gods, flute Gods and word Gods.

Today, I want to talk about my word Gods, Master Wordsmiths or Super Scriveners - take your pick. 

I have a great pantheon of Word Gods but my holy trinity is P.G. Wodehouse, J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen King. As a logophile, these are the altars where I worship.

I will begin with Wodehouse. When I was younger and started reading Wodehouse, my father used to tell me to learn to appreciate the humor in the language more than the story or the dialog. He was the first one to introduce me to the phrase sustained metaphor. Here is a good definition. And Wodehouse excelled in them.

Let us look at some examples. 

The cruise ship steward in The Luck of the Bodkins (an amazingly hilarious book by the way), an irrepressible gabber,  talks about his mother several times. Once, he says that she was incapable of finding her spectacles on an iceberg. 

And a little later:

The steward looked lugubrious,  as if he had just peeped through one of the portholes, and found his mother stranded on an iceberg. 

That was over a longer interlude in the story. Sometimes, he does it in a single sentence:

Having no further revelations to make, the vicar's daughter popped off.

Or:

The pastor reacted as if he had discovered erastianism in the community.

The other type of metaphors that he used often were mixed metaphors. You would almost miss them if not for the way the characters reacted to those.

Some great examples:

"He has got cold feet, the worm!" - Stephanie Byng

I could have crushed her here by pointing out that worms don't have feet - Bertie Wooster

And again:

"You are a snake in the grass who goes behind people's backs stealing their girls from them." - Tuppy Glossop

"No, no!" I said surprised on learning that this is what snakes did - Bertie Wooster 

And again:

I wonder the food didn't turn to ashes in our mouths! Eggs! Muffins! Sardines! All wrung from the bleeding lips of the starving poor!"

Oh, I say! What a beastly idea!"

Unexpected Metaphors - I love these as well. Some examples:

A gust of compassion shook me. (This is most likely Bertie Wooster - and a great pun too since gusts are supposed to shake us too)

My soul writhed in agony, like an electric fan.

The thought stirred me up like an egg whisk.

As all good cooks go, she went! (I love the unexpectedness of the second part, as there is always one).

He was as broke as the Ten commandments

This from Hot Water:

Lady Beatrice - "I wish you would go to more picture galleries and plays. They are so good for you."

Packy: "Yes they are. I can feel my soul swelling like a poisoned pup." (This is my favorite - apparently all those plays didn't do much good to his language).

And how about his own metaphors? I once read a review about Wodehouse as the only author to have three original metaphors per chapter. Here are some of my favorites:

She turned him down like a bedspread. 

She gave him a look that curled him up like a carbon paper. 

The Butler entered the room, a solemn procession of one.

I will end it with a couple of my personal favorites: 

She blushed like the explosion of a tomato canning factory at sunset.

She had a voice like thick rich cream made audible.

"In a hundred years' time `the kind of man who reads P.G. Wodehouse for pleasure may become synonymous with an extravagantly fastidious taste. And that indeed is as it should be." - Evelyn Waugh

Worming my way through my reading list

 

A commentary on all that I read - fiction and non-fiction I went completely digital with my reading over a decade ago. And since then, I have been collecting books with the avarice of a miser accumulating money. Sometimes, I miss physical books. I still have a good collection of them but I also have digital formats of them and so never really read the physical books. One advantage of having physical books is that when I look at my collection, I feel a bit daunted about all the ones that I have not read and that, at least, may stop me from buying more. With digital books, there is no such pressure unless I look at my list obsessively. And before I knew it, I am somewhere in the north of 2,000 books in my digital library and wondering when I am going to find the time to read all these books. Every once in while, I read a review for a great book and go to Amazon to buy it only to have Amazon show me this shocking message: “You purchased this book on Mar 2, 2016. Read now?”! How did I end up here? I remember my impecunious childhood where I had to ration books to make them last or re-read them until I could lay my hands on my next book (this was before I could afford membership in lending libraries). This is exactly what happened to me with my music collection! Remember owning only a half dozen cassette tapes and wearing them down listening to them incessantly? Now, when I bring up my current favorite music player on my phone and accidentally stumble on the All Songs list, I get this very helpful message: Playing time 62.5 days What it is telling me is that, if I start at the beginning of my collection today and play it continuously, I will get to the last song in my collection after a couple of months! This is forcing me to come up with this theory: The amount of time that you have to read or listen to music is inversely proportionate to the size of your collection. I will call it The Thodlas’ Theorem! Is it ok to leave books unread before moving on to others? I am sure many do it. I look at my reading list like it is a well-stocked buffet. Every time I pick up something to read, the others look more appetizing. And it doesn’t help to be in a family full of bookworms who are constantly suggesting new books to me. In fact, there are so many of us bookworms in the family that it is beginning to look more like an infestation. I should at least draw some genre-boundaries. The trouble with me is that I can’t! I am jumping from genre to genre and book to book like those howlers in the Amazon jungle. I got this impulse under control for a while. Imposed a strict edict on myself that I would finish reading a book before even looking at others. That resolution lasted for a few months. And going along that path, I started reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Halfway through that book, I read a review of Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni and the reviewer was so persuasive that I should drop everything and read this book that that is exactly what I did. No regrets about it though. The Golem and the Jinni was outstanding (I completed it by the way)! The same thing happened with Bill Napier's Nemesis which was recommended to me by one of my brothers and which looked like another one that I would read through but alas! came along The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman ending up as the nemesis of Nemesis! I love Philip Pullman’s books. His Dark Materials Trilogy is in my all time favorite Top 10 books list (more on this in another post). I blame this book flirtation on two things: The Google feed on my phone keeps showing me all kinds of lists: 10 Books You Must Absolutely Read Before You Die 25 all time great science fiction books and so on… The other is a kind of virtual book club virus that is constantly doing the rounds in the family chat groups. Everyone is always reading something and they are only too happy to tell me that I should read whatever they are reading too. Genre-boundaries! I think that is the ticket. And if I can pick a genre that no one else is interested in…sigh

Happy Places

It is all in my head - Bhasker

Happiness in life is the fulfilment of childhood desires - Freud

It's a memory technique, a sort of mental map. You plot a... a map with a location - it doesn't have to be a real place - and then you deposit memories there that... theoretically, you can never forget anything. All you have to do is find your way back to it. - Dr. Watson about Sherlock Holmes’ Mind Palace

I will let you into one of the rooms in my mind palace because I think that you would like visiting it. I haven’t added any further decorations to the room since I originally built it in my youth. But, it is a room that I visit often. Because, it brings memories of sunshine, a younger world and fewer worries.

Stay with me as I walk you through it.

During my teenage years, one of the best ways that I could spend a Saturday would be to take a trip to the British Library in Madras (yes, it is still the city of Madras in my mind, no matter what everyone calls it now). One of the sensible things that my father did was to get hold of a British Library membership. I don’t know how he did it because the wait time was supposed to be interminable. And so, for a glorious couple of years, I had access to it.

I would get there around 10.30 am, but, instead of going to the Library first, I would do a short detour to Anand theater which was practically next door. Anand theater was one of the few in the city that screened English movies. And, their advance reservation counter would open at 10.30 am. I would get a ticket for the matinee show (which movie? Did it really matter?)

And, then, I would go to the library. The British Library was a great place. It was air-conditioned (if you are from Madras or visited that place, you would know why that is such a big deal, especially in those days!). I liked the hush of the place. It was a place where you could be alone with your books without being lonely! And for a high-functioning quiescent introvert like me, that was almost worth the price of admission.

The staff always seemed friendly; a little extra friendly towards me because I was almost always the youngest one in the library. When I borrowed or returned books, they would always comment on my reading choices. Most of the time, they looked at my reading choices with amusement, sometimes with consternation and sometimes with respect.

It was heartening to see fellow-readers; the citizens of a reading nation, if you will. There would be conversations with strangers, almost always quiet as if most occupants felt that they were in a temple of worship. I remember an old man picking a conversation with me when he saw me holding a book by Henry Cecil. He asked me whose recommendation it was and when I told him that it was my father’s, he said that my father was giving me the best of recommendations. I already knew that to be true, having tested that hypothesis multiple times (may be, I will talk about how much my father had influenced my reading in another blog post).

British Library was my source for books by P.G. Wodehouse, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, not to mention Henry Cecil, W.W. Jacobs and Jerome K. Jerome. (Sadly, they didn’t carry any James Hadley Chase, Alistair MacLean or Desmond Bagley; I found much later in life that all these were British authors too).

I read big SF anthologies, unheard-of PGW books and hilarious Henry Cecil books from the library.

I would return the books I borrowed and spend the first hour browsing through the aisles of books. For a bibliophile and a logophile like me, it was the closest to being in heaven. Before I started going there, I had the erroneous impression that they only carried books by British authors but found out on my first visit that they only carried books published in the UK.

I would pick the books that I wanted to borrow and others that I wanted to read in the future that I could skim through and find a seat. The other thing about the British Library was that they had extraordinarily comfortable seats. Perfect for reading (or for falling asleep as I found a few doing).

I never looked through the books that I was borrowing but skimmed through the others that I was going to whet for future reading. I read their dust jackets, smelled the paper (honestly, I did :)) and read random pages from those books. Years later, when I read any of those books for the first time (for, I didn’t always borrow those books on future visits; they were either unavailable or I had forgotten about them; I was terrible at taking notes!), I would always wonder why certain passages seemed so familiar.

Most likely, by this time, it was time for me to go the movie. I would check out my books and carry them to the movie as if I was going to school, drawing strange looks from others in the theater. Who brings books to a movie theater? I would sit in the theater (air-conditioned!) and continue reading my books until they turned the lights off.

I mostly remember how it felt to be going home at the end of the day after a good day’s work (or non-work). And years later now, sometimes I wonder how my life may have turned out if I didn’t read. But I can’t! Reading is so much a part of my ethos, heck a part of the Thodlas’ ethos, that I simply can’t imagine living my life any other way.

And now, let me turn out the lights in this room and put the Faraday’s cage around it so that it stays intact in years to come, for, I see much need for its use.

Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever - by another great British author - Philip Pullman

Thinking about food is good food for thought

I think I suffer from a severe case of gastronomic xenophilia - a phrase and affliction of my own imagination. And like all imaginary afflictions, I seem to have all the right symptoms. Consider this:

- An indecent obsession with food
- The more foreign and untried, the better
- A strong urge to research the cuisine of a place I plan to visit even before reading about what the place has to offer

I tell everyone that I have wanderlust; the need to see new places, experience new cultures and meet new people. But who am I kidding? Instead, what I have is gastrolust - the need to taste new cuisines.

And on every trip of mine, I seem to fixate on one specialty of the region. On my recent trip to Brazil, it was Moqueca or more accurately, Moqueca Bahiana. Take a look at the picture.

Looks a lot like Kaeng Phet Daeng Kai - the Thai red curry; has similar ingredients too. But they are worlds apart (pun intended). Moqueca is mostly eaten with Farofa - a toasted flour mixture that is surprisingly filling.

It was Moqueca in Rio and Moqueca in Salvador. This single-item obsession of mine is the same as when I was obsessing about Assam Laksa in Malaysia and Pla Neung Manao in Thailand.

I seem to find no cure for it!


Layers

I wonder if you have heard of a palimpsest! Wikipedia defines it as, “… a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been either scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused, for another document.”

Archeologists who have found palimpsests seemed more interested in the underlying layers.

I first came across the term in Carl Sagan’s CONTACT. Metaphorically, a palimpsest means anything with hidden layers of meaning. And, as you “scrape off” of the top layers, other layers may reveal themselves.

When I posted this picture on my photo stream on Google+, I titled it “Jo Baat Tujh Mein Hain, Teri Tasveer Main Nahin” without thinking about it too much. I was borrowing the title of one of my all-time favorite Rafi songs to say that any picture of Taj Mahal hardly does justice to the charm of the monument itself. And I set it aside.

And then the layers started coming off:

1. That song is from a Hindi movie called Taj Mahal
2. It is set to Raga Jog which is rumored to date back to the music court of Akbar, the grandfather of Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal.
3. It is considered to be one of the most popular Ragas used in the Agra Gharana

I am a Madaraasi and I don’t even understand Hindi very well; and this sounds like pure Urdu poetry. But a good deal of the lyrics seem to apply to Taj the monument as much as they apply to the woman he is singing about.