Accidental Blogger
A general interest blog
Category: Books, Authors & Poems
-
I was supposed to post this last Monday but with my excitement surrounding Andrew's post, I forgot all about it. It is Fiction Week at the American Scholar, featuring a different author every day of the week. Check it out here. Introduction to this week's edition by fiction editor, Sudip Bose: The American Scholar takes its commitment to…
-
When a Detroit minister named Mayowa Lisa Reynolds went to her City Council last summer to complain about malt liquor advertising, she came prepared.The minister had conducted a survey in which she found a Colt .45 billboard in every square mile of the city. She looked in the nearby, majority white suburbs of Plymouth and Royal…
-
Search for 'Graham Greene' on the Internet and you will have to wade through a whole lot of hits on the actor of the same name; look up 'Distant Thunder' and most of the links lead to the Hollywood movie of the VietNam war. Read Adam Gopnik's review of new books on Churchill and you…
-
Why am I not surprised? Because I have read some of the books. The content of the linked article is a bit disgusting but not surprising. Ayn Rand was authoritarian, controlling and heartless. That she would be attracted to a sociapathic killer without a conscience should not come as a shock. What is more disturbing is that a number of business leaders, elected…
-
I came across a website last night that purports to "analyze" one's writing style and compares it to that of famous authors. Naturally, I was curious. After analyzing seven random blog posts, my writing style came out to be like that of Cory Doctorow (4 times), Kurt Vonnegut (2) and David Foster Wallace (1). "What, no…
-
In my inaugural post I had indicated that my first choice of name for this blog was Periodic Table. I explained why in the end I decided to call it Accidental Blogger. Author Sam Kean's (who also writes for 3 Quarks Daily) book The Disappearing Spoon is about the Periodic Table. I plan to read it. Judging from the chapter…
-
Sukrita Paul Kumar in the New Quest. The Chinese Cemetery The smile in the photographIs no reflection of what liesIn the dark hollow of the tunnels Behind cement squares in rows,Each, one-by-one in sizeMarked by dates, picture and name Of a tiny flash A dot of life in the universe Ashes in urnsAncestors as conceptsIn…
-
Remember Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal chiding the federal gov't for monitoring volcanoes and intruding in the lives of citizens under the pretext of helping them? Among the many boring things he said, here are a couple: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and enterprising spirit of…
-
Forget literary critics; see how famous authors eviscerate each others creative talent and output. Examples: Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Nabokov (1972) As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 'forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it. John Keats, according to Lord Byron (1820) Here are Johnny Keats's…
-
A few days ago, I asked my co-bloggers to comment on an excerpt in the Guardian from Globish, a book by Robert McCrum whose blurb reads: How English erased its roots to become the global tongue of the 21st century. 'Throw away your dictionaries!' is the battle cry as a simplified global hybrid of English conquers cultures and continents. In…
-
As I stirred in a tablespoon of yogurt culture in scalded milk cooled to a lukewarm temperature, I think back to when I first got it from a friend, a few days after landing in the US. The culture of bacteria (smuggled in past the noses of the US Dept of Agriculture and the Customs,…
-
One Holocaust survivor, Berthe Meijer, says she remembers stories told by Anne Frank to her when she was about 6 years old, not too long before Anne died in the camp at Bergen-Belsen. Meijer's memoir (in Dutch) is due out soon. But others have cast doubts on her story, tagging it as 'too good to…
-
Having read (just) a few of her reviews over the years, I don't believe Michiko Kakutani knows much about books or literature. But I am quite confident that she knows even less about network technologies and even less than that about literary theory. Look at this rambling mess. On second thought, skip directly to the…
-
A review of a fascinating book about the Kalash community of the Hindukush. Be sure to check out the video. (via 3 Quarks Daily)
-
Up until now, whenever I have written about authors (eg. here and here) rather than a particular book of theirs, my impressions of them were gleaned from reading several books. I have only read one book by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a 19th century author who wrote more than eighty (may be more) literary pieces that included novels, poems and plays. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (The Wikipedia link describes the…
Accidental Blogger 