Interest in the new biography of literary lion V. S. Naipaul continues. Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is was written with full cooperation from Naipaul, and that fact makes the horrific (and, we are led to believe, honest) accounts of his abusive personal relationships even more unsettling. At one level I am not […]
Throw Me In With The Throwbacks
As a follow on to an earlier posting here about awards for bad sex writing (11/26/08), I found myself fascinated by Toni Bentley’s captivating review of Ian Kelly’s new biography, Casanova in the Sunday Times Book Review. A biography about a legendary philanderer is not a topic I would ordinarily find compelling, but Bentley goes […]
Wisdom, at 100
Photo by Angela Rowlings From an interview with Elliott Carter (who turned 100 this year): Have you gone through periods of different styles? Elliott Carter: The way I think about it is that I’ve always considered my works as adventures. They were always adventures in something I didn’t know anything about, like finding a new […]
Catching Some Happy
OK. This is just a bit hard for me to swallow. My friends’ friends’ friends are impacting my happiness quotient? Are social contagions real, like obesity and smoking? And if these findings are in fact “true” (whatever that means) is there a moral obligation in all this as well? Weakened from my bout of FP […]
The Big E
Very interesting article on Slate about the emotion I crave most from everything in life—politics, friendships, painting, food, sex—and with a wonderful name all its own: Elevation. (I always did love that song by Bono of the same name…) And near the end there is a discussion of elevation’s counterweight, disgust. This is particularly poignant […]
The Peaceful Majority
Tom Friedman wrote an editorial in the Times on Wednesday titled, “Calling All Pakistanis.” His plea was for the average citizen in Pakistan to step forward and denounce this extremism—not just for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake as well: Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence […]
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Report from the North
It’s hard to not be cynical when the talking heads announce that the US economy is “officially” in a recession and has been since December 2007. The absurdity of not being able to name what everybody knew until a year after the fact is one more piece of what feels like the cold-blooded machinations of […]
Mumbai is a Golden Songbird
Tree shrine in Mumbai, August 2008 As a follow up to my earlier posting about Mumbai, I am including a very moving op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times over the weekend. For those of you who are long time or newly converted Indiaphiles (I’m in the latter category) I think this piece […]
Philip Schultz
Failure To pay for my father’s funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can’t remember a nobody’s name, that’s why they’re called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable. The rabbi who read a stock eulogy about a man who didn’t […]
Mourning Mumbai
Taj Hotel in Mumbai, August 2008 The last several days my thoughts have been focused on the tragedy in Mumbai. I have only been to Mumbai once, and I have no family blood ties to that or any other part of India. But sometimes a place or a culture captures you inexplicably, and that is […]