Month: February 2014
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Drunk With Love
“Drunk With Love”, by Rana Farhan, magnificently mesmerizes with style, and an abundant beauty. Based on a poem by Rumi, the words of an ecstatic love poem, are brought to life in a smooth and serene way. Farhan sings the song in Persian, but in English, the words are searing. Drunk With Love- lyrics by…
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Persian Tattoos
Tattooing among Persians, especially among gypsies and nomads, goes back as far as the 19th century. In Iran, it was common for upper class women to have patterns adorn their hands and feet, to, in their belief, provide strength or protection. Although the art of tattoo in the middle east is forbidden by religious scriptures,…
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Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly
The opening in Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly”, is reminiscent of Guillaume Canet’s Little White Lies (2010): a playful group of friends turns out to be childish and overbearing, and their holiday arrangements entirely banal. The Camera dizzily following each person, as the vacationers arrive at the ramshackle beach house, mending broken windows and doors while…
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It is Sung in Yellow
Don’t listen to my voice, it is sung in yellow Don’t touch my heart, it’s sick with coldness Don’t get close to my soul, it’s been abandoned for years Don’t touch my brain, its pain is contagious And from afar, make me feel like a mystic A déjà vu of a creature that once existed…
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The Rise of the Single Dad
Caroline Kitchener in The Atlantic Today, more men than ever are making the same choice. A Pew Research study published this statistic this summer: 8 percent of households with minor children are now headed by a single father, up from just one percent in 1960. This represents a nine-fold increase, from fewer than 300,000 households…
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Writers Into Saints
Tim Parks in The New York review of the Books Over the last ten years or so I have read literary biographies of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Hardy, Leopardi, Verga, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Moravia, Morante, Malaparte, Pavese, Borges, Beckett, Bernhard, Christina Stead, Henry Green, and probably others too. With only the rarest of exceptions,…
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Blue Melancholia is Approaching
It’s not about death, or the end drawing near. It’s not about love or hate among sisters, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters or husbands and wives. Nor is it about ” happiness”, with its usual smirk, hiding all the depressing feelings of melancholia. It’s not “about” anything in particular to many who haven’t experienced it. It…
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Poet of the Caribbean- Derek Walcott
Teju Cole in Sunday Book Review, The new York Times “Writing poetry is an unnatural act,” Elizabeth Bishop once wrote. “It takes skill to make it seem natural.” The thought is kin to the one John Keats expressed in an 1818 letter to his friend John Taylor: “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the…
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Why is Academic Writing so Academic
Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm…
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A Day in the Life of the Ku Klux Klan
“Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America! A Message of Love NOT Hate!” These words are the first, one sees after going on the Ku Klux Klan’s, website. But the Klan’s name has always been synonymous with hatred and white supremacy sentiments, antisemitism, racism and hatred against blacks. Anthony Karene, a…
