A thing is a thing. To humans, however, things make all the difference. They fill gaps in our lives in ways we never imagined. Consider this. A driver’s licence is a small piece of paper that says we can drive on a country’s roads.
“But also — the license, talismanic pass to life: we may flash it to fly, skydive, gamble, tattoo ourselves, pierce ourselves, marry each other, register an assault weapon, drink, smoke, chew, dance, see a striptease, see jazz in the clubs where it belongs, rent a car… , donate blood, file government forms with new employers, receive unemployment,” — and so on is what Professor Meredith Castile will tell you.
The Object Lessons series lets you in on how life hums around these objects. Started in 2013 as an essay and book series by The Atlantic and Bloomsbury, the arguments yo-yo between how a golf ball may outlast human civilisation and the first lighter was born from broken pistols.
Barthesian exploration
Better yet. Who designed the modern compact lighter? It will tell you that an English engineer called Greenwood, who had just lost an arm in the WWI. As it is downright impossible to strike a match with one hand, necessity became the mother of invention. Object Lessons is practically a treasure trove of trivia. Anecdotes, scraps of overheard conversations, a passing mention in a film, book, speech or even a costume — it starts with popular history. But it’s more. It is a biography, a Barthesian exploration of a thing or a provoking conversation with a like-minded.
Every read is one down the rabbit hole. The book on the cigarette lighter is as much about lighters as is about Ted Ballard, the man behind the National Lighter Museum. The museum itself is a ripe setting for a story. Less than half an hour into a chat, the man greets journalist and author of the book, Jack Pendarvis with a tobacco pouch made from a human scrotum. You could say that we, the inhabitants of Earth, are peculiar beings.
The entry point to these books — that bunch up as oddly as a remote control, glass, dust, password, doorknob, bookshelf, bread, silence, refrigerator and a sock — is all academic. It looks like series editors — Ian Bogost, Professor, Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Christopher Schaberg, who teaches English and environmental theory at Loyola University, New Orleans — aim to give a shot in the arm to the long-suffering academic writing.
The lesson part is not all about excavating information on a topic but discovering a fresh perspective on the world. Things you have always wondered about. How the refrigerator changed the meaning of the word fresh, for instance. It... “used to mean straight from the source when applied to food, but today it is generally a synonym for ‘not rotten.’”
Even the insights on philosophical topics like silence are not self-indulgent.
“We know how to signal silence. We even know how to spell it: shh. The representation of silence itself, though, challenges writers, composers, and artists.”
It rather comes from a point deeply personal, trying to find your place, or the meaning of your existence in the larger scheme of things. Playwright John Bigeuenet, also the author of the object lesson, Silence, shares that when he saw the devastation Hurricane Katrina-hit New Orleans suffered, silence became something else.
Sense of suffocation
“My sister, also living in the Dallas area, brought us to a film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, to take our minds off the still unfolding catastrophe. As the comedy unspooled in the darkened auditorium, I began to feel as if I couldn’t breathe. That night, I told my wife what had happened. She was shocked — because she had experienced the same sense of suffocation. In fact, she told me, she almost had to leave the theatre in the middle of the film.”
In effect, Biguenet and among other New Orleanians lost their ability to watch a film or read. The silence engulfing them in these experiences had become unbearable.
“If my experience guides, reading is, essentially, a fitful silencing of the self, at least when the self is able to accept silence.”
To him, silence was now synonymous with terror.
Object Lessons, pegged at 150 pages on an average, are snappy reads with long-lasting impressions. According to its website, Objectsobjectsobjects.com, the books are written by scholars, writers, scientists, artists, journalists, and others. As they are ongoing, the editors invite contributions and suggest possibilities that a curious mind can explore.
The writer is a quirky journalist based in quirky Mumbai. Although she reads all the quirky books, she leads rather a boring life.