Mukul Kesavan concludes a wonderful essay on Lucknow, the English language, Indian writing in English, the Indian summer, and ice-cream with: [T]the point of writing isn’t to make things familiar; it is to make them strange. Kesavan is right. To read is a form of escapism and what good would it be if we all weContinue reading “Mukul Kesavan on Making the Familiar Strange”
Tag Archives: literature
What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art (and Literature)
In ‘What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art‘ (New York Times, April 12, 2013), Eric R. Kandel writes: Alois Riegl….understood that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only does the viewer collaborate with the artist in transforming a two-dimensional likeness on a canvas into a three-dimensional depictionContinue reading “What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art (and Literature)”
The Sidewalk Book Disposal Scheme
New York has lots of books: in stores, libraries, shelves in private collections, sidewalk sales, and sometimes, in boxes on sidewalks, being given away, with or without a sign that says ‘help yourself.’ These books have been abandoned; their former owners do not have the space (or time) for them any more. Perhaps a moveContinue reading “The Sidewalk Book Disposal Scheme”
Shakespeare, Drayton, and Birdsong, Then and Now
In his The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, Peter Levi wrote, [H]istory and family connection do as much to throw light on Shakespeare as a poet as academic criticism has done, and maybe more. The problem is that England and Stratford and the Elizabethan age are all somehow part of his great mystery, andContinue reading “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Birdsong, Then and Now”
‘The Master’: Coming Undone And Putting It Back Together
One way to ‘read’ Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master is as an enormously ambitious, technically brilliant cinematic riff on Ron Hubbard and Scientology, on a time fertile for cults and messianic healing: post-WWII America, when broken men–post-traumatic stress disorder is as old as war–drifted back home, and were, just as many other Americans, looking forContinue reading “‘The Master’: Coming Undone And Putting It Back Together”
Mary McCarthy on Madame Bovary as Neurotic
Among the most famous descriptions of Emma Bovary are Mary McCarthy‘s cutting lines: [She] is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is remarkable only for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling. Ouch. But what follows these lines is a perhaps more interestingContinue reading “Mary McCarthy on Madame Bovary as Neurotic”
One Read, Another One Beckons. What Could Be Simpler? Or So You’d Think
It never gets old: I still get a thrill out of finishing one book, and then walking over to my book shelves to pick out the next one to be read. There are many unread tomes in there; who knows what pleasures lurk in them, waiting to be delved into, savored, and hopefully, treasured forContinue reading “One Read, Another One Beckons. What Could Be Simpler? Or So You’d Think”
Are We Inventions or Discoveries?
Is my identity determined by my choices and my actions? Or does my identity determine the choices I make and the actions I take? Do we make up ourselves as we go along, each choice and action working like a brush of paint, a chip of the sculptor’s chisel, a sentence of the writer, bringingContinue reading “Are We Inventions or Discoveries?”
Colm Tóibín on the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’
Colm Tóibín writes of the intimate relationship between facts and fiction (‘What Is Real Is Imagined’, New York Times, July 14 2012), about how the story-teller’s primary responsibility is to the story, about how the novelist may, in creating fiction, embroider the facts, embellishing and enhancing, for being stuck just with the facts is not aContinue reading “Colm Tóibín on the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’”
Ursula Le Guin and Philosophy of Feminism Reading Lists
Ursula Le Guin‘s appearance in a recent conversation I had with some friends about favorite science fiction novels brought back memories of the time I used The Left Hand of Darkness in a class. In the fall semester of 2007, I asked to teach Philosophy of Feminism. I had long wanted to do so, andContinue reading “Ursula Le Guin and Philosophy of Feminism Reading Lists”
Samir Chopra 