Our very first post on Crow & Colophon — TBLM’s new substack— brings some happy news. The 57th issue of The Bombay Literary Magazine has been published.
This is the first of our three issues for this year. Issue 57’s collection of stories, poems, photoessay, translated stories and poems span a wide range of subjects, settings and eras. This includes: a set of 1,100-year old poems from Tamil Nadu, the double-consciousness of an emigrant Indian, a daughter’s portrait of the Artist as Father, a visual narrative of a sojourn in Japan, tender love poems from China, barn light from Germany, a gender-defying Urdu poet from pre-independence India, two stories contoured around the search for a spiritual leader, and a number of stories and poems dealing with love and loss in our Age of Restlessness. We think you’ll find things to love.
Editors fall in love too, but we like to do so on a rather regular basis. We will soon begin reading for Issue 58 (May 01). As a subscriber, you will of course get a heads-up on the call for submissions and other goodies. Happy reading.
Colophon: A Discontentment with Tables of Content
Anil Menon
We have a new issue and with it comes an old hesitation. We need an announcement, yes, but what’s the point of just putting up a cover image and some happy talk? It’s uncouth. It’s like inviting someone to dinner and pointing them to the fridge. Providing a table of contents (TOC) seems like the minimally decent thing to do. But now that we have provided a TOC, we can’t help wondering: does it serve any useful purpose, really? Sure, it’ll make the contributors happy. It’s a nice challenge in content positioning for interns. There is the bureaucratic burp of satisfaction in dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. It makes us look respectable. But for the reader, that beloved varmint who plagues publishing, does it do anything for the reader? And if it does— it probably does— can we do it better?
TOCs are not a new invention. The table of contents was invented some 50 years after the birth of Jesus Christ. We credit historians who credit Pliny the Younger who credits Pliny the Elder who in his letter to his friend the Emperor Vespasian, credits a chap called Quintus Valerius Soranus for inventing this astonishing technology:
... Because for the public good I must go easy on the busy demands on you, the contents of individual books [Pliny’s Naturalis Historia] are subjoined to this letter from me, and with utmost care I have managed to eliminate your having them to read through…This was done before me, in our literature, by Valerius Soranus, in the books entitled Mystikerinen.
Aside: Soranus lost his table of contents, viz. his head, a few years later.
TOC or no TOC, it’s a safe bet the Emperor passed on a perusal of Naturalis Historia’s 10 volumes. Of course, it could’ve been the sheer word-count and not the limited usefulness of TOCs, per se. All TOC enthusiasts have as their holy grail the example of Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family. What is Jarrell’s book about? Well, here is its TOC:
Chapter 1: The Hunter.
Chapter 2: The Mermaid.
Chapter 3: The Hunter Brings Home a Baby.
Chapter 4: The Bear.
Chapter 5: The Lynx.
Chapter 6: The Lynx and the Bear Bring Home a Boy.
Chapter 7: The Boy.
There’s practically no need to read the book! Indeed, it’s a safe bet most reviews of the book were probably written on the basis of the TOC alone. Write too comprehensive a TOC and the book becomes superfluous.
Write too terse a summary (such as the one we’ve provided for this issue), and the TOC becomes superfluous. What a nuisance.
If not a TOC, then what? The TBLM editors flat-out refused to write inveigling blurbs for the content they’d selected. No item numbers, they shouted. There was no question of asking our contributors to post Tik-Tok videos.
The invention of tables of content also marks the invention of the discontent with this tool. Pliny the Elder was addicted to them, and chances are, he was discontent with his addiction. He noticed that we have tables of content because we gives titles to artistic works. Titles too are an invention. Pliny remarks on the way the Greek artists, whom he greatly admired, titled their works:
...you'll find, in these books, that they labeled their perfected artworks, the ones, even, that we never wonder at enough, with "hanging" titles, e.g. "In production-- Apelles" or "-Polyclitus," as though art is always in process and completed, so to counter the spectrum of judgments, there would still be a fallback position for the artist to beg pardon, as if anything found wanting was going to be put right, had there been no guillotine....
Titles give the sense a work is complete. Tables of content mummify that sense into statement. But truth is, none of the contributions in this issue are complete. They can never be complete. Not necessarily because the authors have anything further to add or subtract. But because the work will be completed only when they find a place in the reader’s head, their private table of contents. That this will happen is mercifully uncertain. Were it certain, why table of contents, art itself would become superfluous.
We will find contentment then in uncertainty, that old friend of the writer, and leave the issue and its contents to the reader.
About the cover image:
While searching for paintings about fish (long story), we stumbled across Bud James’ photograph of old sewing machines in the display window of a clothing store in SoHo, NYC. It was love at first sight. Bud James specialises in art & travel photography, and thanks to his kindness, we were able to use the photo as a cover for the magazine. Check out Bud's fine art and travel photography at www.budjames.photography. You can also find more of his work at his Insta hangout @budjamesphoto.