Accidental Blogger
A general interest blog
Category: Books, Authors & Poems
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No one speaks the language of politics as thoughtfully, accurately and dispassionately as Orwell did. The contrast with the heedless conversation witnessed in our recent political campaign about patriotism, honor, "real" America, socialists, terrorists, pigs, pitbulls and barracudas is painfully stark. Here is an interesting blog – Orwell’s journal entries published daily on the same…
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Stanley Fish is famous for taking seemingly gratuitously extreme, provocative positions for the sake of aggravating his readers, many of whom wrongly associate him with a bland, outmoded flavor of so-called postmodern "thought." (That’s a topic for another day’s post.) His occasional columns in the New York Times typically generate polar responses in the comments…
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I wish I were more familiar with the works of Milan Kundera, one of whose books I read approximately fourteen thousand years ago when Philip Roth compiled a series for Penguin of then unfamiliar Eastern European writers. This story reminds me of the lingering disgrace of literary theorist Paul de Man, whose "palling around" with…
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The long awaited resolution to the hotly contested Hari/Harry Puttar/Potter suit has emerged, in Hari’s favor. Well, not really long awaited, and probably not all that hotly contested. In fact, this case, like the recent suit resulting in an injunction prohibiting the publication of a Harry Potter lexicon, pretty much points out the imbecility of…
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See our own Andrew’s review of economist Robert J. Shiller’s new book The Subprime Solution, in The New York Observer.
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Indeed! The empire of the Harry Potter franchise has long arms. Trade mark H.P. is guarded like the Fort Knox (is Fort Knox still being guarded?). Any infringement, real or perceived, on the pricey trademark is cause for legal action. A Mumbai based film company is now feeling the wrath of the magical money making machine…
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The reviews on Amazon and in the Washington Post of The Girl from Foreign, Sadia Shepard’s journey into the past to resurrect her Jewish Indian grandmother’s lost identity, has left me curious enough to put the book in my Amazon shopping cart. I plan to check it out in the near future. The story is common…
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"To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force,…. is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe." : Josiah Harlan, 1799-1871 – First American in Afghanistan Recently, in quick succession, I read two books about Afghanistan. One, "The…
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My reading skills are declining. For instance, I’m not sure what this recent, “most popular” NYT article is about. At first it appears to pit reading books against reading online digital text, as if one were compelled to choose exclusively between the two, or as if the two behaviors were distinct approaches to a single…
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A couple of days ago, a group discussion among the A.B. authors about blogging matters degenerated quickly into a somewhat lengthy exchange of jokes and a brief analysis of what makes us laugh. I was reminded of that late day e-mail thread with my co-bloggers when I came upon a book review (not a favorable one)…
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From an earlier discussion on memory, a chance wrong link sent me on the search for information on neuroscientist Ian H. Robertson. While I couldn’t dig up the much quoted research article regarding the inability of younger people to remember phone numbers as well as the older generation(primarily on blogs, which ought to have thrown…
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I haven’t read the book – only seen a couple of reviews. As Sam Anderson says in the New York Books article, Intercourse, a collection of 50 stories by Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler, is a well written gimmick. But a fine gimmick no doubt, because public interest in the sex lives of…
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A very interesting article by George Orwell from 1943 in which Orwell weighed in on the art and value of pamphleteering. [link: 3Quarks Daily] The interesting fact, not easily explicable, is that pamphleteering has revived upon an enormous scale since about 1935, and has done so without producing anything of real value. My own collection,…
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This recent review of a translated version of noted Urdu author Joginder Paul (Ruchira’s father-in-law) sparked the question: How much is being lost in translation? (Thanks to Ruchira for the link to the Library of Congress recordings and Bio. page)
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Seventy four adoring (and adorable) cat quotes by a mad poet – all of them apt! My favorites: 19. For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.42. For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.70. For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer. Note: Brought to the front from…
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