The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan My rating: 5 of 5 stars Brutal, unyielding, and flummoxing in its violent telling, The Garlic Ballads may have been more aptly titled, The Garlic Laments. This book is shocking and nearly absurd in its rampaging cruelty. I spent most of my time reading it with my eyes bulging…
Category: In Other News
Somespecialstuff. Hoarded tidbits of thisthatother purloined from herethereandeverywhere and allovertheplace.
Book Review: Quicksand by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
Quicksand by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was such an utterly fascinating read. What begins innocuously as a tale of forbidden love between two women quickly unravels into a novel of grand deceit, depravity, narcissism, blackmail, and deliberate wickedness. More than once while reading it I was reminded of Sarah Waters…
Book Review: The Meaning Of Night by Michael Cox
The Meaning Of Night by Michael Cox My rating: 4 of 5 stars Imagine you find a book that promises to keep you company a few days – being a 700-page tome – and it does more than that. It occupies your days and nights. It aids you in the disgusting addiction of nail-biting to…
For God’s Sake – an open letter to a Muslim terrorist
“This pen, this perfectly innocent pen.” So said Harold Pinter. Going by the news in Paris yesterday when masked gunmen stormed into the offices of Charlie Hebdo and killed, among others, cartoonists, editors, and journalists. Their crime? Cartoons of the prophet. Pretty tasteless. Maybe funny. But it’s a satirical perspective. But the pen has once…
19 things the world is teaching me today
I am sick, sick, sick to the stomach with the world we live in. Our girls are being raped day and night. Planes are being shot down. Israel is bombing Palestinian civilians. There are floods and droughts at the same time. There are people dying of hunger and an obesity epidemic at hand simultaneously. The…
Know your goddesses and learn something about your women
I really, really like Upworthy. Their tagline best describes what they’re here for and what they’re about: ‘Things that matter. Pass ’em on.’ So when I saw them endorse and post a link to this ridiculous ad campaign doing the rounds on the Internet recently, I was part-appalled, part-sorry, and part-pissed off. Appalled because it’s…
“People are hungry, and one good word is a bread for a thousand.”
One word is candy. Many words is a meal. I believe that you always get back more than you give. That came to hold true once again a few weeks ago when I put out some of my favorite words and asked people on Twitter to tell me some of theirs. These were words we…
“Sometimes it is better if you cannot find the right words. In some religions, everything can be destroyed with a word.”
I prefer not to reproduce lengthy excerpts on my blog, but when I read Anushka Jasraj‘s Radio Story in Granta, I found myself scribbling and tweeting lines as I went along. The entire story is elegantly rendered without losing the grittiness that is the ultimate residue of truth and human behavior. You can read it here in its entirety, but this…
What else are people selling (in India) online?
Earlier today I posted an entry which comprised a series of ads I’d seen on a popular commercial website that features “wanted” and “for sale” ads, like Craigslist. It made my morning, I’ll tell you that. Ever the glutton for a good thing, I went back. Yes, I did. And found more gut-spilling treasures. Now I…
What people are selling online, in India
I usually blog with words. Once in a while I come across something that defies the need for words. Like today, when I found myself on a Craigslist site of sorts looking at some “For Sale” ads, and came across some really interesting things people were selling. 1. Just in case you were concerned about…
between desire and disaster 