Booknomics

That’s the Word For It: Skeuomorph

A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains nonfunctional design attributes from the original. This means that the design features of a contemporary product is modeled on objects that the user is already familiar with. Take for instance a software calendar that looks like a desk calendar or a calculator app modeled on a real calculator.This simplifies things for the user but now designers are moving away from this trend.

I was hoping to find this word in some sci-fi literature but came across more definitions:

“Skeuomorphic is the technical term for incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies, even though they no longer play a functional role. Skeuomorphic designs are often comfortable for traditionalists, and indeed the history of technology shows that new technologies and materials often slavishly imitate the old for no apparent reason except that is what people know how to do. Early”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“A multitude of design trends has come and passed over the years, often conditioned by external technology innovations, such as the birth of social media or the first iPhone. From the 90’s guest counters and solitary guestbooks to skeuomorphism, from flat design to parallax scrolling, the core of any good website has always been and will always be the user experience.”
― Simone Puorto

That’s the Word For It: Fugacious

The word fugacious deals with emotions and interestingly also to the idea of withering leaves in botany. Fugacious derives from the Latin verb fugere or flee. Some derivative words include fugitive, refuge, and subterfuge.

A beautiful word to use in literature:

“Love is a fugacious word. Rounded and comfortable, it lifts the tongue and fills the back of the throat, before slipping beyond reach as the sound is exhaled from the mouth. Yet the word eludes meaning. Love teeters on the edge of the unknown beyond which it becomes almost impossible to speak. It moves us beyond words. We speak about love when we define our longing and desire and yet we fall into silence when we attempt to speak about it in the present.”
― Jonathan Rutherford, I Am No Longer Myself Without You: An Anatomy of Love

Interview: Susan Hopkinson

We spoke to the author of Teaching Yoga in an Upside-Down World, Susan Hopkinson.

Susan Hopkinson was born in the US and grew up in Canada before moving to Europe in 1990. She has lived in Belgium since 1991, but India captured her heart on her first of many visits in 1997. Since then, she has been on an endless pilgrimage, regularly visiting teachers and friends across India. Susan loves travelling and meeting new people around the world, with or without her Yorkie, Metta. Her two adult children are probably her greatest accomplishment; they support her teaching and writing by cooking and dog-walking whenever they’re at home.

Susan discovered yoga in Toronto in 1985, began teaching in 1998 and qualified as a yoga therapist with the Yoga Biomedical Trust (London) in 2007. Yoga has been a valuable support through many life challenges, and she shares it with the aim of alleviating the suffering of others. After 20 years of teaching group classes, she now sees students individually and at retreats, guiding and counseling people from around the world through physical, emotional or spiritual issues, online and in person. Susan has been helping transform lives for over two decades using the wisdom of yoga, mindfulness, astrology, and Ayurveda.

You can visit her site and catch her on Instagram. A more detailed bio of hers here.

Tell us briefly about your yogic journey.

I started practicing yoga when I was at the University of Toronto. This was in 1985 and I was feeling very uncomfortable in my body, and sitting to study for long periods of time made my back hurt. I was in poor shape, and I decided to try yoga because I was never very interested in sports and wanted to do something by myself, for myself. I enjoyed it right away and it has stuck with me in some form or another all this time.

I was very lucky to have encountered some wonderful and sincere teachers, Indians and Westerners, in my 30-plus years of yoga practice. I’ve had the blessing of seeing how yoga teachings can change lives and be highly effective thanks to their clarity and simplicity, and not because of some magical siddhis or physical prowess. Yoga has sustained me throughout many challenging periods in my life, like the death of my third baby from a brain hemorrhage. Importantly, the most powerful aspects of yoga have little to do with āsana and much more to do with the mental fortitude and clarity that yoga brings. Changing our perception of what is happening in our lives is an extremely powerful skill to develop, and one that is central to a sincere yoga practice.

Tell us briefly about your book Teaching Yoga in an Upside Down World and what prompted you to write it.

Teaching Yoga in an Upside-Down World is a response to the increasing commercialism and shallowness we can find in the world of yoga, especially over the past ten years. Many yoga teachers I have encountered are insufficiently equipped to teach, and too many rely on brief trainings offering teaching certification with low standards. Among such teachers, there is a lot of confusion and misinformation. When I hear yoga teachers say that Buddhism is for the mind and yoga is for the body it makes my toes curl. Yoga – strongly influenced by Buddhist philosophy, which is a foundation for Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra – is essentially a training of the mind that includes our physical body because they are inseparable.

In the US in particular, there is a certain amount of resistance to the Indian origins of yoga which include mantra and yogic philosophy, which seems to scare some people who don’t understand the true benefit of such practices. This is a major reason the physical aspect of yoga has become overly important these days – there is a rejection of what is unfamiliar by those who aren’t ready to examine and test their own beliefs. It’s worth mentioning here that it is not entirely the fault of Westerners, many of whom are interested in practicing and teaching a holistic and sincere form of yoga. Much of the shallowness we see today is also due to opportunistic South Asian teachers who may or may not be legitimately qualified to teach, and who often teach short (lucrative) courses scratching the surface of yoga to gullible Westerners.

Over many years it occurred to me that there wasn’t one book which provided an overview of what is useful and even vital to know as a contemporary yoga teacher. I started ‘Teaching Yoga in an Upside Down World’ in answer to questions from my own students who were contemplating yoga teacher training, and it grew from there. Teaching as a householder has its own complexities, which those who are single – and especially single and (ostensibly) celibate males – don’t have to contend with. So, I also wanted to share something of how my personal challenges affected my teaching in different ways. Initially, I wanted to include stories from many different yoga teachers but as I only got a very small number of responses, I kept it mainly about my own experiences.

Sitting down and writing is unhealthy as is any desk job. What is your advice to writers who spend long hours cramped on their swivel chairs?

Sitting down to write is indeed a really unhealthy thing to do over so many hours and So. Many. Days. I have never been as sedentary as when I was writing a book on teaching yoga!

My best advice to writers is to get a dog or borrow one. My dog got me out of the house several times every day so I could be active, connect with (urban) nature, and breathe fresh-ish air instead of sitting at my computer all day. I also invested in a modular standing desk: it’s simply an adjustable metal frame to support your laptop, so you can stand or kneel and change position regularly. I find I think differently when I’m standing, so it was also helpful during the reviewing and re-writing stages.

Unless I was really on a roll and deeply focused on what I was writing, I took lots of breaks to stretch and make tea (so much tea!). This supports better breathing and stimulates creativity as well. Here’s a good (quick) exercise for correcting writer’s slouch: Stand up (or sit on the edge of the chair if you can’t stand up for any reason), clasp each of your wrists with the opposite hand and raise the clasped arms up to head height. Press the back of the hand (near the wrist) that is closest to your head into your forehead while tucking in the chin and lifting the crown of the head. Gently squeeze the elbows back and the shoulder blades towards one another while lifting the sternum (the heart center), and try not to arch the lower back. Breathe and smile while doing this – don’t struggle with it. After 10-15 seconds you can release the arms and feel how your posture and breathe have improved.

What has been your favorite moment as a yoga teacher?

It’s impossible to identify one single moment, but I always love those times when I can see a student has truly understood something profound about themselves, their bodies and their relationship to both.

You have talked about how difficult it is to teach yoga in times like these when yoga has been severely commercialized. If there is one piece of advice you want to give practitioners and teachers out there, what would it be?

It makes me happy when people who have practiced or taught yoga for years tell me that they have learned something new from the book, or that it made them reflect more deeply on their own approach to yoga. My aim is to sharpen the discernment (viveka) of the reader so – at the very least – they know why they practice or teach what they do. A good student of yoga will keep a beginner’s mind and a healthy skepticism of what they are being taught until they can know it for themselves – take nothing at face value, especially highly mystical notions or anything that takes your individual power away. Yoga is such a powerful tool for transformation, but if we ignore the ultimate purpose – liberation from the bondage of the mind – we can become more deeply embedded in our samskaras, all the while thinking we are doing something quite spiritually elevated when, in reality, we’re doing nothing more than what circus acrobats do!

Tell us about your journey with self-publishing.

What a learning curve! I decided to self-publish because I am basically impatient, and didn’t want to 1) hunt down and wait around for a publisher to decide whether and when they wanted to publish my book and 2) let them keep the rights to my work! A friend of mine wrote a book which she submitted to her publisher in April 2018, and it is scheduled for release in the summer of 2019! Why make readers wait so long?! I really appreciated being on my own publishing schedule and as such, I was also able to choose the best dates for publishing according to the most supportive astrological transits (I am also an astrologer). I can make corrections to mistakes found after publishing as soon as they are discovered, and have so far made three changes in the three or four months since the book was released. This allows me to offer the reader the best possible quality product without having to wait to issue a new edition of the book.

I was on a tight budget so I asked friends and colleagues to read parts of the book instead of finding an editor. As a result, I had to do a lot of work on the various drafts apart from the basic writing. The structure of the book emerged after almost a year of writing it in bits and pieces – there’s a moment when things just seem to come together. I had a clear idea of what I wanted for the cover so I went to Fiverr to find the technical support. After one truly awful version, I found a woman who got it right on the first try and it was reasonable, including re-formatting for the Indian edition.

I also had to find technical support on Fiverr to help me with pagination and getting the headers right. I spent many anxious hours sorting that out after the book was ready to go, but the delay and the need to reformat the book also provided an opportunity to find more mistakes to fix before publishing!

Your favorite asana?

It’s a toss-up between Padmāsana (lotus pose) and Sukhāsana (posture of ease), both of which help me find the grounding and stability I need in my practice. I sit in these āsanas for prānāyāma, meditation, and mantra practice.

Your favorite book on yoga/any other subject?

I spent a lot of time thinking about this question because I have read so many influential books over the years and it was hard to narrow it down. At the risk of pandering to the audience, I have settled on the Bhagavad Gīta. It has such a universal and timeless appeal, plus a real beauty in the rich story behind the message, and – most importantly – life-changing lessons which we can all benefit from contemplating regularly.

What’s your next project/book that we can look forward to?

I am converting my course called ‘Align with Purpose’ into a book format – it’s part theory and part workbook. The course combines everything I have learned over 30 years of self-development, teaching, and helping others. It includes Yogic and Buddhist philosophy, Āyurveda and Astrology to help people discover their own strengths and weaknesses in 12 areas of life and – hopefully – their higher purpose in this lifetime. Many people consider a job or work should be their higher purpose, and although for some it might be, I want to show people that how they are in everything they do is contributing to their purpose. I hope to complete it in late 2020.

Jai Guru Dev!

Thank you Susan for your extremely informative responses! Was a pleasure talking to you. Wish you all luck for future projects!

That’s the Word For it: Garniture

Garniture is a fancy word for accessory and deals with embellishments and decoration. In vogue from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, a garniture is a collection (usually odd-numbered) of matching, unidentical, decorative objects displayed together usually on the mantel shelf of a chimneypiece. Usually, these are made of metal, ormolu, with gilded wood stands, porcelain, etc

It’s where the word garnish comes from as well.

This is an archaic word and seldom found in literature:

“She was made to sparkle, to be bright with outside garniture, — to shine and glitter, and be rich in apparel. The only doubt might be whether paste diamonds might not better suit her character.”
― Anthony Trollope, Complete Works of Anthony Trollope

“Above the fireplace: a scene of a cow jumping over the moon, in an elaborate gilt frame. On the mantle below, we see a clock…, flanked by garniture sturdy enough to be a murder weapon out of Agatha Christie.” — Rumaan Alam, Slate, 23 Aug. 2016

Visual Friday: Writers of India – Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

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That’s the Word For it: Fecundity

Fecundity has to do with fertility not just literally but in a figurative sense as well. So it could refer to a lush valley and equally so to the rich vocabulary in a story. Biologically speaking, fecundity refers to the potential of having offspring as opposed to fertility which refers to having offspring itself.

Some instances of the word in literature:

“Along with the mystical wonderment and sense of ecological responsibility that comes with the recognition of connectedness, more disturbing images come to mind. When applied to economics, connectedness seems to take the form of chain stores, multinational corporations, and international trade treaties which wipe out local enterprise and indigenous culture. When I think of it in the realm of religion, I envision smug missionaries who have done such a good job of convincing native people everywhere that their World-Maker is the same as God, and by this shoddy sleight of hand have been steadily impoverishing the world of the great fecundity and complex localism of belief systems that capture truths outside the Western canon. And I wonder—if everything’s connected, does that mean that everything can be manipulated and controlled centrally by those who know how to pull strings at strategic places?”
― Malcolm Margolin

“Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. Mrs Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr Ramsay repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure. She blew the words back at him. “Charles Tansley… ” she said. But he must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made furtile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life—the drawing-room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must be filled with life.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

That’s the Word For it: Profluent

This word has Middle English and Latin roots and has to do with flow. You could use the word to describe music or a piece of writing. Here’s an example of how the word can be used.

“A few years later, when I learned that Jayne Anne founded the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark, I had to apply. She was the program’s director, and also taught fiction workshops. I loved being in her classes. We read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Fat City by Leonard Gardner, and she showed us the songs of their lines. Lines was the word she used to describe sentences. No matter their construction, sentences were to be linear and profluent. Subject, verb, object.”- Nick Ripatrazone, Is Line Editing a Lost Art?

Interview: Anil CS Rao

We spoke to Anil CS Rao, a graphic novelist in Hyderabad.

Anil CS Rao is a self-trained digital artist specializing in comics and graphic novels. He studied engineering at Pratt Institute in 1988 and did an MFA in writing and an MS in architecture recently. His wife Padmaja who has been painting and drawing since her elementary school days is a self-taught artist. She did a brief course in painting at the Washington Studio School in DC. Most of her life was spent working as a lecturer at St Teresa’s College in Eluru, India. He left Hydrabad in 1968 at the age of four and recently returned to reside again in Hyderabad, Telangana in 2017 under the OCI scheme with his wife and children after having worked for over fifteen years as an engineer.

Tell us about your latest work Manhattanville/Y2K.

Manhattanville/ Y2K - Telugu I had worked from 1990 to 1994 in the City of New York in the capacity of Electrical Designer and my focus was on primary low voltage systems such as telephone, fire alarm, etc. My short story Manhattanville – the first in the anthology – was based on my observations of people working for the New York City Civil Service as well as a vague allusion to a bus depot I had been assigned to work on as a design engineer. During its construction, I visited the real-life construction site and became friends with many people working in the construction inspection and project management team, who were primarily of Indian origin members and mostly from the state of Gujarat in India. This is fiction – not to be construed as documenting real lives or scenarios – but of course, the characters, setting and plot were a composite of my imagination and many of the friends I had made during that project’s construction.

Likewise, Y2K is based on similar observations when I later worked as an Operations Engineer for the State of California around the time of the so-called ‘Y2K’ computer glitch. The purely fictional scenario, characters and setting were once again a composite of my imagination and real-life stories of people I met while working for the State of California from 1999 to 2002.

You’ve written prose novels but there are more graphic novels in your repertoire. Why is that?

I have an MFA in Fiction from the National University in San Diego (offered 100% online) in which I took all my advanced electives in fiction writing. The only program in The States in Comic Book Creation (‘sequential art’) was at the time offered as a residency Masters at Cal Arts – and I would not have been able to physically relocate to California, given my family and other logistical reasons. Hence my first work Bharathi: Her Theory of Everything was done for my MFA Thesis requirement despite my wish to submit a ‘graphic’ piece which would not be accepted in fulfilling the department’s Thesis requirement.

Describe the process of writing a graphic novel.

I use solely a relatively ‘canned’ character/environment 3D program called DAZ Studio for my CG generated artwork. My wife then alters, modifies and/or ‘corrects’ my CG work in Adobe Photoshop. For scripting, I initially used CELTX software – but now the program no longer supports the comic book format I currently just work from a template in MS Word. Of course, things change when translating a written script into a graphic novel/comic book. One becomes in many ways a cinema director interpreting a script for celluloid in that unknown elements might impose changes (in my case a lack of 3D resources).

You collaborate with your wife Padmaja as well. Tell us about the experience of producing books and art with your better half.

My wife is a very proficient painter with excellent freehand skills. I learned my lessons from my past work which was released without her help. Now all my work is scrutinized by her prior to committing to print.

While creating your novels and art, influences of the US and Hyderabad seep into your work. Why?

I was born in Hyderabad in 1964 at Neelofar Hospital – it may be the case I will breathe my final breath in that same hospital. Hyderabad has been always in my heart, despite immigrating to the United States in 1969. I subsequently visited Hyderabad almost every summer holiday I was given by the American school system. In 2016, I returned to Hyderabad with my family with really no plans of ever returning to The States.

Your books are also published in Telugu. What kind of challenges do you face while writing in multiple languages?

I first attempted a Telugu work way back 12 years ago. I was trying to come up with a Telugu language script for Ingmar Bergman’s script for his film titled Winter Light. I feel this would be the best example to cite because of both the parallels and cultural asymmetries I faced – in translating not only from one language to another – but in transposing the dialog and the culture in which its rooted from Sweden to India – specifically a village in Andhra Pradesh with a Lutheran pastor in a small church morphed into a Hindu Brahmin ‘pujari’ servicing a small Vaishnavite temple in Andhra. I ran my pitch to noted Telugu poet A. Jayaprabha (co-author of a book of poems with PV Narasimha Rao – Unforeseen Affection) with whom I was an acquaintance in Hyderabad at the time. Her comment summarizes the dilemma I faced: “Telugu people just don’t talk in that manner”. This was prior to my marriage to a Telugu-speaking Indian National and now, after having lived in India on and off for the past 14 years I have some inkling of the real Indian idiom with respect to dialog and behavior of Indian characters in contrast to their Western counterparts. By the way, I am still working on this project 12 years later. I have not given up – only drastically changing the plot and other elements of Bergman’s original script so that I am not accused of intellectual or aesthetic theft.

Tell us more about this work in progress.

My current work-in-progress (to be released in Telugu and English) is Vizag Blue. If you google the term, you’ll find it refers to a very beautiful blue marble quarried in or around Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. It’s a metaphor for the protagonist of my work as seen at first by her Nurse attendant and the Doctor treating her: beautiful, hard, and cold. The narrative was inspired by an Ingmar Bergman film from the 1960s titled Persona starring Liv Ulma, a woman (stage actress) who is admitted into a Swedish psychiatric hospital for not being able to verbally communicate, and her relation with her nurse attendant Sister Alma. That is about where the commonality of characters and settings ends. My work takes a totally different trajectory plot-wise than Bergman’s original masterpiece.

Kalpana, a student of theater at the Andhra University in Vizag is engaged to a fellow student who subsequently breaks his engagement to return to Mumbai to his parent’s place to continue his studies there. Soon after his departure, Kalpana begins ‘hearing things’ and finds herself in an expensive mental hospital in Vizag. Instead of revealing her hallucinations to the medical staff, she maintains silence and refuses to speak. The doctor, Reena Rao, observes her for a month and is unable to find anything wrong with her symptom-wise and offers her vacant beach house outside Vizag were she could get out of the hospital setting along with a private duty nurse Usha. The house had been on the market for over a year and rather than pay someone to watch over it, Dr. Reena thought this arrangement would be mutually beneficial. Normally, Kalpana is kind and compassionate in nature. When the ‘voices’ rule her mind her thoughts turn nasty and negative. Her relationship with Usha goes beyond the superficial as Usha uses Kalpana’s silence as a backdrop to narrate her own failures in love and marriage. Usha narrates a story about her first sexual encounter with a boy in her village when she was 16. And upon accepting the boy’s advances, she becomes hesitant and the boy subsequently rapes her. She later becomes pregnant with his child and her mother attempts to force her to have a ‘home abortion’ rather than face family stigma. She also narrates short explanations of her husband Anil, who during his student days was a radical communist who ironically is of Brahmin parentage. The abortion is stopped and Usha and Anil marry to adopt the child as their own. After a while, smoking a hidden supply of marijuana and experiencing symptoms, she reacts to an expression of hurt by the nurse after reading a letter she wrote that was returned to the post office for lack of proper address. In the letter, she writes very negative opinions of Usha and the stories she shared with Kalpana. Kalpana runs out of the house on the beach as Usha pursues her. Usha trips and ceases her pursuit. In a shaded grove adjacent to the beach, Prem appears as a hallucination and they both take a ride on his scooter through Vizag. He informs Kalpana that he had broken his engagement in Mumbai and now wishes to be engaged once more to Kalpana. On the beach, they consummate their love – at least in Kalpana’s hallucination……

Your favorite graphic novel?

Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World. Its convoluted plotline and dialog mesmerized me, and later more so the film adaptation starring Steve Buscemi. Clowes graduated from Pratt Institute in 1984 just when I started my BE studies there (I graduated in 1988).

Your experience with self-publishing.

Pothi.com – the best in the business. No more comments required on this question.

Was a pleasure talking to you, Anil! All the best for your future projects!

Visual Friday: Writers of India – Anita Desai

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That’s the Word For it: Plangent

The etymology of the word plangent is fascinating. This word with mournful connotations takes its origin from the Latin plangere which translates as the lamentations of beating the breast. The word is used a great deal in describing music but can be used with a sigh to talk about calamitous political situations and emotional dramas.

Here are some literary instances of the word:

“Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“To this waltz, born in a distant, snowbound country out of longing for just such a flower-scented summer night as this, Rupert and Anna dance. They were under no illusions. The glittering chandeliers, the gold mirrors with their draped acanthus leaves, the plangent violins might be the stuff of romance, but this was no romance. It was a moment in a lifeboat before it sank beneath the waves; a walk across the sunlit courtyard towards the firing squad. This waltz was all they had.”
― Eva Ibbotson, A Countess Below Stairs