Accidental Blogger
A general interest blog
Category: Books, Authors & Poems
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Just a link dump, sorry, but this is a remarkable piece of writing: If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to our sense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness, digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the laws of horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration. Like jellyfish or hydra polyps, they always elude…
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A very interesting article at 3 Quarks Daily about dust.
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“Psychotherapy: Lives Intersecting” IS unique in its field….As a therapist, teacher, researcher, husband, and father [Louis Breger] has learned many things and gained much wisdom in a 50 year career. In this professional memoir, he is passing it on, and telling the truth to people who need to know.
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I finally got to read Katherine Boo's 'Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" a few weeks ago. Praised to the high heavens as an authentic portrait of authentic people (as opposed to fake Slumdogs) in Annawadi, a dirty, sewage cesspool surrounded by assorted huts, inhabited largely by upwardly mobile…
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I have been meaning to write a proper review of Leila Ahmed's autobiography A Border Passage ever since I finished reading it a couple of months ago. But the inertia that has befallen any attempt at writing a substantive blog post once again prevents me from writing a well thought out review. I will leave you…
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A Fishy analysis of The Hunger Games (yes, I know, that is So Last Month, but please bear with the professor, he is not quite upto speed with the 'passé'ness of some memes) ) vs. my own market-colored (and timelier, of course) take on the books. A treasure trove of photos from early…
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Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist best known for his work on moral foundations, the basic dimensions along which peoples' moral intuitions vary. These include care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Interestingly, Haidt's research suggests that while conservatives bring all these dimensions to bear upon moral deliberation, liberals and libertarians use only the first…
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Long piece at Salon about Jonathan Franzen, the internet, and sincerity, in the context of some recent controversy regarding things he’s said about Twitter. This bit is unsettling: But it’s the discussion of a last conversation with his mom that resolved the Franzen paradox for me. As he told his mother secrets about himself on…
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Bob Glaser was among many psychologists who cautioned the public and educators about the limitations of testing. “In a report that called test results “fallible and partial indicators of academic achievement,” the panel [headed by Glaser] warned educators to avoid letting them become “the major goals of schooling.””
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On Halloween Day last year some of us got into a conversation about ghosts, first on the blog and later via e-mail. One thing led to another and three A.B authors (Sujatha, Dean and I) ended up reading an anthology of Bengali ghost stories (Hauntings) translated into English. Each of us approached the book from different perspectives given our…
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Los Angeles just got a little less interesting. The landmark bookstore on Melrose has closed. According to the story, it may or may not reopen as a bricks-and-mortar operation. God forbid it only tries to keep virtually afloat. I've never cared to read books about spirituality, except for a traipse through Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography (prompted by…
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Vaclav Havel wove theater into revolution, leading the charge to peacefully bring down communism in a regime he ridiculed as “Absurdistan” and proving the power of the people to overcome totalitarian rule.
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“British author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died, aged 62, according to Vanity Fair magazine.”
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I found the poem so alluring….Each time I read it, I enjoyed it that much more, but…I was less and less certain of what Stevens was trying to do, to say, to get across. I think it is a religious poem,…Christian…, but he seems unsure about what he believes. No matter. I still enjoyed…it.
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For the non-believer, should a hint of religion in a poem, or even an obvious reference, detract from the appreciation of the poetry?
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