1. If you love cricket or have admired the writings of C. L. R. James -- a wonderful first of a three part series abt his life.
Derek Walcott on CLR James: "sentences of a great prose writer contain light, natural light...the feeling of approaching dusk." cbc.mc.tritondigital.com/CBC_IDEAS_P/me…
2. On the extraordinary & violent rise Chinese intelligence and counterintel capacities under Mao (& Zhou en Lai) to the present when State Security divisions try to hoover up CPU/GPUs for supercomputers on American export control lists.
3. On an understudied poem of Indian literature -Tirukkovaiyar - a 9th-century Tamil poem dedicated to Shiva. Leah Comeau on thinking about a world of devotion in early medieval Tamil which goes onto birth new worlds, cognitive space & material sensations. traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1560305965.…
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For 2021, a new thread of sentences, I have found of interest/provocative/moving
Read freely, quote happily, attribute with caution. For a similar thread from 2018-20, see below:
“I’d never say this in public – I still love beautiful books and believe in them.” -Jacques Derrida
“I have sometimes been troubled by a doubt whether what is true in one case may not be true in all. Then, when I have reached that point, I am driven to retreat, for fear of tumbling into a bottomless pit of nonsense.”
– Socrates (Plato, Parmenides)
“I perceive that in Germany as well as in Italy there is a great struggle about what they call Classical and Romantic, terms which were not subjects of Classification in England – at least when I left it four or five years ago.”
Farewell John le Carre, thank you for all the extraordinary books and the immortal George Smiley. It was no doubt very hard work, but you made it look so effortless, made it all so human.
9. Richard Lloyd Parry narrates his deep & perceptive essay on Japan, Japanese royal family, & the greatly admirable previous Emperor Akihito & his efforts to make the monarchy & Japanese society more sensitive to harm done in his father's name. [mp3] sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo…
10. An excellent long conversation with Stephen Kotkin on the occasion of the 100th birth anniversary of the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, conservative, anti-Communist, and a terrifying moral presence. files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2019…
11. Excellently fun & insightful conversation w/ Pratap Bhanu Mehta who talks to two Pakistanis who probe what does it mean to be Indian, what is the Indian project, where does it fall short -- a great many interesting & open questions discussed. feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2452922… [.mp3]
if you know Malappuram in Kerala & the dynamics of its Islamist politics, 'Halal Love Story' on Amazon Prime is very interesting & good -- about two guys (from Jama'at e Islami) who set out to make a film.
it speaks to a deep truth: even the orthodox enjoy cinema.
how then can they go about participating in a modern art that has its own grammar of presentation & aesthetic which doesn't efface the moral ambitions of their self-consciously fashioned antimodern views?
understandably, the filmmakers argue -- religion is not the opium of the masses. cinema is.
all this is done in a light, spoofy sort of way.
plus, good to see Malabari Malayalam spoken on the screen without caricature.
In a different valence, another kind of Brindabani Sarang by Aarti Anklikar | द२स् बिना... vimeo.com/m/26470626
another version of Brindavana Saranga
excerpts from a verse composed during the Sangam era, 100 CE to 300CE, reimagined by the genius of Anil Srinivasan (piano) and Sikkil Gurucharan (vocals)