Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Sunday, October 04, 2015

The Best Book Summary award

Zwei of my anchor points - Chuck Jones, Flatland - intersect in The Dot and the Line, a book by Norton Juster. With "A Romance in Lower Mathematics" for a tagline, I continued on the wiki.

Here's how the story goes
The story details a straight line who is hopelessly in love with a dot. The dot, finding the line to be stiff, dull, and conventional, turns her affections toward a wild and unkempt squiggle. The squiggle then takes advantage of the line's stiffness by reminding him that he's a lot more fun for the dot. The line's friends tried to get him to settle down with another female line, but he refuses. He tries to dream of greatness until he finally understands what the squiggle meant and decides that he needs to by mysterious and unconventional. Willing to do whatever it takes to win the dot's affection, the line manages to bend himself and form an angle. He works to refine this new ability, creating shapes so complex that he has to label his sides and angles to keep his place. When competing again, the squiggle claims that the line still has nothing to show for the dot. He proves his rival wrong and is able to show the dot what she's really worth with him. She realizes that she has made a mistake after seeing what the line was really offering her. The dot wondered what she had thought she has seen in the squiggle to be freedom and joy was nothing more than chaos and sloth. The squiggle tries to reclaim her love, but finds himself out of shape. Fed up, the dot tells him off how she really feels about him. She leaves with the line, having realized that he has much more to offer, and the punning moral is presented: "To the vector belong the spoils."

On the movie
In 1965, famed animator Chuck Jones and the MGM Animation/Visual Arts studio worked with Norton Juster to adapt The Dot and the Line into a 10-minute animated short film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, narrated by Robert Morley with the narration almost verbatim to the book. The Dot and the Line won the 1965 Academy Award for Animated Short Film.[1] It was entered into the Short Film Palme d'Or competition at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival.[2]

Friday, September 04, 2015

Infibeam over Flipkart

My bookbag is again full. I can count 8 new ones ones in possession through the past week. It is a bit enervating, considering it's been a while since a full-novel read. With work done, I hope, there is time. Writing in detail will come later.

Right now just wanted to put a smooth shopping experience out there. I was going to order a set of books from Flipkart, until I ran into Infibeam. That helped with an instant saving of INR250. Flipkart is out of its discounts and free shipping these days. Albeit their book inventory is the largest, Amazon and Infibeam are also there to match (Amazon, I believe, will over time, get the book market). I'd already ranted about how FK is losing out on customers because of poor sales support. This gives another reason to customers like moi.
Flipkart - INR 1229

Infibeam - INR 973 (-256)

Monday, November 03, 2014

Crazy Jacket, if there is one

I found this book description in a Google Doc. It is twisted thinking how the text was prepared. It reads like a preview, but isn't. It looks so random, much like all unique words of the book shuffled and slapped randomly. It's hard to believe it all could be in the same book, but is. It could be a project to try out.
It is something Kilgore Trout could write.
---

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Sunday, February 23, 2014

Anything but books


The day's end has pushed a sense of urgency into me. So I thought I should blog. It will calm me down, and, though not change the temporal nature of things, but will afford me some mental space to both accomodate, as well as stretch related thoughts - the play dough - into new shapes. Urgent things make me feel confrontational, and being a pacifist, waving the peace sign and all, confrontations impulsively feel wrong ("confrontations are bad, m'kay?"). Feeling wrong, the only affordance is to feel even more of so.

Affordances remind me of the day that went by. I went to the World Book Fair, something that I find myself visiting year after year, as if I were the biggest book nerd out there, when in reality I return with a bagful of brochures and peeves.

I went nuts seeing this on the shelves (Simon & Schuster). 
Do I need tell about Ylvis and the fox?


My number one peeve with the Fair is the fair itself. Too many people in too little space. Bodies bumping, brushing and bruising against each other. Somebody always there to burp or fart within an arm's distance. Broken toes for sandal-men like moi. The human body offers some ambiguous affordance, especially one that isn't ours, which we assume to be pliable and yielding.

This being India, I would be mocked for my sentiment, since we have the phenomenon of religion, which attracts discomfort as if that was the redeeming part of the experience. Hordes throng to temples during the big festivals, chanting and pushing. Armies march through the alleys of old Delhi during Muharram, bleeding and singing. There isn't an inch of space to move; the only people expert at deftly moving through the crowds being the pickpocket gangs. Despite all that, you see really happy people. [wonder how much business physicians and policemen get in the aftermath] Let's not digress.

An additional feature of this Book Fair, which is uncharacteristically taking place in Feb, was the equation of jackets - everybody had one on as they came in, and through the stalls you would find sweaty people walking in discomfort, ultimately giving in to the urge to take theirs off, dead baggage in hands, and then, later fumbling with putting it back on again soon as they stepped out. Being weather-agnostic, I managed fine in a shirt, and didn't have to go through the experience of this particular observation (yes, I don't empathize, but sympathize, on this occasion, which is rarity since clumsy misfortunes are my thing).

Peeves apart, there were only a coupla stalls I enjoyed. One was Roli, which was selling books , and the other a hobby store, which was selling anything but books. The former is doing some creative/innovative stuff (see: CMYK bookstore), but it was the latter that managed to get some currency outta my pocket - creative stuff is hard to sell, hobbies aren't.

Among the books, there was something else - I found myself toying with monoculars, binoculars, magnifying glasses, compasses, and other things that I imagine would save lives on one of the days in the coming coupla' months filled with high-energy adventures and misadventures. Now I have a list of items - totaling more than any books could've - to order through that hobby store. To convey cool, I got baby brother a counter, the exact one as in the Axe commercial to keep "score" - wtf moment on realizing that in India it's being marketed as a "pooja/mantra/rudraksh-counting" aid.

Either side of the Book Fair were spent at Mandi House. Tried Triveni Art Gallery's rooftop tea cafe, which was a bland and uninspiring affair that neither me nor Ghoru are gonna be reminiscing. The nukkad-wale stalls seemed to offer better fare, which we should check out next time, or maybe after we're done with the adjacent Bengali market which has been recommended often.

Friday, December 20, 2013