L'Inde sans Cashmere

I saw this once a couple of years back, and again this week: a map of India on France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast, with the disputed (but largely, and longly Indian-administered) state of Jammu and Kashmir omitted. More than a little odd-looking. Is this obvious cartographic siding with Pakistan a sort of French payback for the loss of their colony at Pondicherry?

Retiring on One String

I'm fascinated by this bank ad that ran on the front page of DNA India:
First, the suggestion that comfy retirement offers the chance to finally play the violin—a worthy goal, though I wonder how often arthritis might get in the way. But what really struck me was the non-Stradivarius-copy features of the fiddle: the slightly larger f-holes, and, above all, the fact that there's only one string! Was this just an error on the part of the props department, or a subcontinental adaption? A few quick searches turned up references to a one-stringed Indian viol called a riti, so perhaps it's that. Though I think in India classical music, the violin tends to be held in a pretty different posture. So who knows? Maybe you!

In any case, I was reminded of the 19th-century Italian virtuoso Niccolò Paganini:

In performance Paganini enjoyed playing tricks, like tuning one of his strings a semitone high, or playing the majority of a piece on one string after breaking the other three.

Bad Photoshop! Bad!

This was the main image on last Friday's Mississippi Clarion-Ledger. Usually I feel a little bad making fun of design choices on not-so-major newspapers—presumably everyone's doing the best with the resources and talent they have on hand. But this Photoshop siamese-twin montage is realy too much. Though including the deposed police chief's microphone as a sort of cancerous growth sticking out from the Mayor's neck does add a bit of metaphoric interest.

Falling Back

Surveying a handful of American newspapers last Sunday, I had fun doing a close comparative reading of how they handled the end of daylight saving time. I guess it's a sad-but-true fact of the mechanics of newspaper journalism that perhaps the most crucial (in terms of having direct effects on the immediate lives of their readers) information that will grace the front page all year is a little graphic of a clock with its hour hand in a motion-blur, springing foreward or falling back.

LA Times: Fall Back Did you remember to change your clocks? Daylight saving time ended at 2 a.m.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Time has changed Did you remember to set your clocks back at 2 a.m. today, or when you went to bed last night? Hope so.

Boston Globe: Turn clocks back Daylight saving time ended at 2 a.m. today. Set your clocks back one hour.

Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger: Fall back Did you remember to set your clock back one hour and change batteries in smoke detectors?

New York Times: A Reminder Standard time resumed at 2 a.m. today. Clocks were set back one hour.

I love the nuances of tone and paper-reader relationship implied in the slightly different phrases. Is the paper offering a patient, reminding, question-marked question; sneaking in an added public-safety tip (darn it! we will be usefuller than the competition!); offering a stern no-fuss order (Boston); or, befitting the paper of record, recording the event for posterity, with none of that messy directly-addressing-the-reader stuff. "Clocks were set back": Pure objective passivity, or so they want us to think.

Helen Keller and Mark Twain

From the American Foundation for the Blind's Helen Killer Kids Museum website:
Here's the description, descriptive indeed for the sight-impared user, and a bonus for the rest of us:

This faded photograph, from 1902, shows four people on a sunny front porch. Helen is seated on the far left, smiling, while Anne stands behind her, signing into her hand. To their right is Mark Twain, sitting with his hands folded in his lap, and Laurence Hutton, who is standing behind Twain and holding a cigar. Hutton was Literary Editor of Harper's magazine and a supporter of Helen's education.

And here is Thomas Edison's 1909 film of Mark Twain—I think the only one there is—of the author doing a silly walk and playing cards with his daughters:

The recollection that sent me off gleefully discovering the above, was a quotation in an article of a few years back, perhaps the New York Review of Books, in which Keller described in detail the timbre of Twain's voice, felt by touching his throat as he talked. I couldn't track the article, or the original down, but this will do well in its place:

The Story of My Life, chapter XXIII:

I read from Mark Twain's lips one or two of his good stories. He has his own way of thinking, saying and doing everything. I feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake. Even while he utters his cynical wisdom in an indescribably droll voice, he makes you feel that his heart is a tender Iliad of human sympathy.

I find it thrilling how, 97 years after Twain's death, probably the best, the closest description we have of his voice was from someone who couldn't, in the usual sense, hear—but whose gift, to herself and to the world, was in learning, largely through metaphorical skill, to transcend the gaps and silences that separated her from his world, and him from ours. "I could feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake". Wonderful.