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Contextualizing Why Women in Typography and Letter Design were Forgotten: A Review of Baseline Shift, Edited by Briar Levit

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  I took my kids to Disney world for the first time in February. I don’t like amusement parks in general. I’m a tea-and-used-bookstore kind of woman; rollercoasters are loud and lack the smell of binding glue. How did we get to Disney if I dislike amusement parks so much? Well, when my children had been sent home from school in April of 2020 and we had to tell them that scouts, sports, and leaving the house were on hold for a while, within their tears was a question about an upcoming birthday party. When I told them that was canceled too, my three boys seized that moment. It was a real low. But my kids, always trying to get the upper hand asked, “When this is over, will you take us to Disney?” Sigh. Of course I would. Photo by  Nathan Langer  on  Unsplash ; Spaceship Earth takes you into the Epcot Ball, where you travel to space and inaccurate history That is how I found myself riding some of the most infuriating rides. I’m not talking about Space Mountain- that was problematic for its
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What I Learnt Today: 15/04/2022

  Postmemory : Marianne Hirsch: “Postmemory” describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before — to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. As I see it, the connection to the past that I define as postmemory is mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one´s birth or one´s consciousness, is to risk having one´s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue i
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What I learnt Today: 12/04/2022

 Despite menstruation’s centrality, even our language fails to represent it adequately, as linguist Suzette Haden Elgin knows. When she invented a woman’s language in 1984, Láadan, she included words that capture women’s diverse experiences of embodiment: to menstruate, to be pregnant, to menopause. For example, “husháana” means to menstruate painfully; “desháana,” to menstruate early; “weshana,” to menstruate late; and—my favorite—“ásháana,” to menstruate joyfully. In Láadan, a woman can “azháadin”—menopause uneventfully. 3 Láadan constructs an alternate reality that challenges the dominant cultural narrative. But feminists such as Elgin are relatively rare; indeed, feminist scrutiny of the politics of menstruation pales in comparison to feminist engagements with other aspects of women’s lives. Source: New blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation By Chris Bobel.  Inter alia: among other things. "the study includes, inter alia, computers, aircraft, and pharmaceu
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What I Learnt Today: 11/04/2022

Politics of Respectability: Rooted in critical race theory, the politics of respectability was introduced by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham to characterize Progressive-era norms of self-regulation and self-representation directed simultaneously at other black people and whites, who required “justification” that blacks were worthy of their respect (1994, 196). More broadly, it refers to efforts to hold marginalized people to hegemonic standards of so-called propriety. Michelle Smith (2014) writes, “On the one hand, like all democratic politics, respectability politics seeks to realize collective aspirations whether grand (justice, equality, full participation) or pedestrian (balanced budget, community policing, bike paths). On the other, respectability politics evince a distinct worldview: marginalized classes will receive their share of political influence and social standing not because democratic values and law require it but because they demonstrate their compatibility with the ‘mainstr
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My Take - Palabar Poth Nei by Suchitra Bhattacharya

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  Palabar Poth Nei by Suchitra Bhattacharya is a romantic thriller novel in which Bhattacharya introduced her female sleuth, Pragyaparomita Mukherjee a.k.a Mitin Mashi. The plot revolves around a newly married woman who is blackmailed by an unknown caller for her allegedly ‘immoral’ past. The plot is riveting and the writing is vivid, which never for once loses its pace. The novel does not merely focus on solving the mystery and unveiling the identity of the mysterious blackmailer rather Bhattacharya in her signature style explores the intricate labyrinth of human nature and relationships. She also compels the reader to rethink the conventional concepts of morality and impurity. None of the characters could be divided into absolutely good and absolutely bad. There is no black and white dichotomy in the narrative rather each of the characters dwell in a grey zone which makes them complex and consequently real, flesh and blood human beings. I have never been disappointed by any work o
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My Take - Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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  Because survival is insufficient. There is an outbreak of a deadly virus in a certain part of the world. However, the interconnectedness of the modern world acts as a catalyst in spreading the virus throughout the world in no time, which results in a pandemic that brings the entire civilisation to a grinding halt. The preceding lines could deftly summarise the plots of numerous post-apocalyptic fictions and movies, as well as the lived realities of our present lives in the face of the on-going corona virus pandemic.             The premise of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven presciently and somewhat eerily reflects the chaos that was to descend on Earth in 2020 in the form of corona virus pandemic. However, in Station Eleven ninety nine percent of the world’s population succumbed to the deadly virus, which in this case was a deadly mutant form of swine flu that had been termed as Georgia flu. The novel focuses on the survival of the remaining one percent of the
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My Take - The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

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  The Importance of Being Earnest is the first work of Oscar Wilde that I read and I am in absolute awe of his writing style. It is an almost two centuries old play yet I am amazed at its reliability as well as readability. Wilde has masterfully employed such chiselled sentences in the play that hardly any word seems redundant or archaic even in the 21 st century. The play is peppered with such witty dialogues that I was rolling with laughter.             The theme also remains as relevant as the witty repartees of the play. Wilde playfully mocks the superficial values of the aristocracy and the landed gentry without being too bitter in his satirising of their privileges. It’s an absolutely delightful play with endearingly silly characters.             I have many favourite lines however I will enumerate a couple of them before wrapping up my review. “Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct
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