A great conversation with Peter Salmon (who talks admirably fast!) on his wonderful biography of Derrida's works & public persona that has metastasized & fragmented, often disallowing for any meaningful coherence to emerge. traffic.libsyn.com/secure/philoso…
13. On Daya Krishna, who per Daniel Raveh was one of the most interesting philosophers (not just Indian philosophers) of the 2nd half of 20thC. A book that distills DK's last decade & his efforts to read through Indian texts imaginatively and critically. traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5587148690.…
14. At age 80, veteran China scholar Orville Schell has published his first novel. My Old Home: A Novel of Exile -- a bildungsroman from the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen in 1989. On the worlds fiction can open & change in modern Chinese history. chrt.fm/track/47257E/p…
15. Adam Phillips, who I read like a student reads his master, writes 'Conscience, in its all too impoverished vocabulary & its all too serious & suffocating drama, needs to be overinterpreted. Underinterpreted it can only... be propaganda'. sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo…
16. On Toussaint Louverture’s revolutionary life with Sudhir Hazareesingh -- kind of remarkable how little of this great anticolonial figure is known beyond the immediate Haitian-French-Carribean milieu. A more extraordinary life is harder to imagine. sphinx.acast.com/historyextra/t…]
17. 'There are 2 kinds of animals in the world: animals that bring their mouths to their prey (eg lions) & animals that bring their prey to their mouth (eg salamanders).'
18. I recently read an essay by Edward Said on Joseph Conrad; later about the life of Sir James Brook (Rajah of Sarawak) who was an inspiration for Conrad's 'Lord Jim'. A fine talk b/w Patrick French & Maya Jasanoff on Conrad, imperialism & other conceits. audioboom.com/posts/7282876.…
19. An illuminating talk on two chapters from 'The Making of the English Working Class' with John Bohstedt -- on the history & logic of riots in early modern England: why were they so frequent? what did it mean for civil liberties & popular radicalism? media.blubrry.com/jacobin/conten…
an aside: E. P. Thompson seems to have been a fun guy too. Capable of salty & sly reappraisals delivered without malice. One line in a letter: “My only affinity to Marx is that I get boils on my neck.” He was a tank commander in North Africa/Italy!
And a poet! People forget that.
20. Great talk w/ Sir Ian Kershaw - on "evil" as analytical category, challenges of psychologizing Hitler, would there have been Holocaust without him, & how did he go from being a life's loser to a colossal monster? & more. 1. sphinx.acast.com/the-rest-is-hi… 2. sphinx.acast.com/the-rest-is-hi…
21. A fun conversation with the novelist & essayist Tariq Ali on the French historian Maxime Rodinson's 1960s biography of Muhammad, the world of empires he was born into, Islam in Spain, & challenges of writing a 'materialist' book abt a religious figure. sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo…
22. If you have heard, read or have been puzzled by Cassirer's writings, an instructive conversation with Samantha Matherne on how Cassirer reworks Kant to formulate critical idealism, the Marburg school, & our "lived experience" in a cultural world. traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5696862214.…
23. Excellent talk w/ Arunabh Ghosh on how Chinese statisticians abandoned Soviet-style exhaustive enumeration, learnd about random sampling thru exchanges with Indian statisticians, & during Great Leap Forward, they began using ethnographic approaches. traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8744757684.…
24. On a monumental editorial project to construct a critical edition of Skandapurāṇa - now edited by Peter Bisschop (Leiden U) & Yuko Yokochi (Kyoto U) -- which began in 1996-97 with a different set of editors.
The project is now half way at volume 5! 🙏 traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN6313468212.…
25. Who were the first Indians? An enthralling talk w/ Tony Joseph which leverages the fast paced developments in paleogenetics to construct a most plausible narrative of how India was peopled & a system of endogamy & hierarchy was sacralized. Fascinating. traffic.libsyn.com/seenunseen/E11…
26. Is "China" really 5000 years old or is it a national myth? Bill Hayton argues that “China” was cooked up by few intellectuals who imported ideas of sovereignty, citizenry etc from Europe a century ago. But what abt Chinese historiographical traditions? traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/a7b4f8…
27. On ibn Khaldun's famous book, Muqaddimah and the lessons it has for us on philosophy of history, economics, biology, sociology, and political theory. cbc.mc.tritondigital.com/CBC_IDEAS_P/me…
28. "The most painful part for me or any other Kashmiri Pandit going to Kashmir is that when you go there you have to live in an hotel, which is probably very close to your erstwhile home."
A measured (but moving) talk on Kashmir & more by @rahulpanditatraffic.libsyn.com/secure/brownpu…
29. When thinking about Chinese student protests, we think about Hong Kong or Tiananmen. But there's one that kicked it all off in modern Chinese history. Rana Mitter on the May Fourth Movement of 1919. And the idea of Mr. Science! audioboom.com/posts/7745485.…
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Call me,
like a grasshopper in a May meadow
like silent sentinels all around the town
like leaves upon this shepherd’s head
like a snow hill in the air.
like a candle moving about in a tomb.
like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs,
like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower
like a corkscrew,
like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man
like another cursed Jonah,
like a bench on the Battery
like a coffer-dam
like an ape
like a string of inions
like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin
like a hamper
like lightning
like a mildewed
like polished ebony
like a tenpin between the andirons
like a strip of that same patchwork quilt
like a Newfoundland dog just from the water
Narendra Pachkhede on G. N. Devy's new book abt the relationship b/w India & Mahabharata: "He does not dwell on what is the relationship of this greatest literary work with our people, but rather he delves into how this relationship functions." thewire.in/books/gn-devy-…
"The allure of the Mahabharata and how it provides insight into its cultural memory in India could be best explained through the idea of a controlling text – a reference point for all thinkers and a recourse to fall back on for the nation."
This review also kindly makes a mention of my book and compares it to the writings of Hilda Doolittle and her poems marked by Greek/Roman myth. Didn't know who she was so had to google her. 😎 literaryladiesguide.com/classic-women-…
word meaning to perish, which comes from an even older word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object only appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. 2/3
In the sixteenth century we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and each other and has been steadily expanding ever since.”
A story about the Gibraltar skull, involving Darwin, always reminds me of how difficult it is to truly speak about the world as we see it. This incident, involving the skull, in a world-historic life such as Darwin's often reminds me of a line by V. S. Naipaul.
In 1864, Charles Darwin had been very sick for weeks. (He suffered various ailments for much of his adult life.)
To "see how I stand change", he and his wife, Emma Darwin arrived at 4 Chester Place in London where his sister-in-law Sarah Wedgewood lived.
[Charles & Emma]
It was a convenient location for Darwin because despite being sick, he could walk over to the Royal Botanical Society and the Zoological Society. In those months and past few years he was writing a book/monograph on climbing plants then.