April 2, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – April
Relax. This is not a column about iambic pentameter. This is a column about the secret history of the English language. But the story of English happens to be the story […]
March 30, 2019
Review: Kural by Tiruvalluvar
Tiruvalluvar. Kural. Translated and edited with an Introduction by P. S. Sundaram. Penguin Classics India, 1990. 168 pages. The Kural generally goes by the title Tirukural, where the “Tiru” […]
March 25, 2019
On A TALE OF FOUR DERVISHES by Mir Amman
Amman, Mir. A Tale of Four Dervishes. Translated from the Urdu with an Introduction by Mohammed Zakir. Penguin Classics (India), 1994. 158 pages. Continuing my exploration of Penguin India’s […]
March 17, 2019
On The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau
In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau. Translated by Paul E. Losensky and Sunil Sharma Penguin Classics India, 2011. 164 pages. The Introduction to this […]
March 15, 2019
In Defense of Walter Scott, Part 2
Back in December, I wrote a post about Walter Scott in which I analyzed his 1818 novel The Antiquary and argued that the work demonstrated that Scott was anything but […]
March 12, 2019
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
In Idylls of the King, Alfred, Lord Tennyson strives to bring the vitality of life to the legend of King Arthur. He seeks to convey a story so ancient it has […]
March 9, 2019
Review: Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra
PATANJALI’S YOGA SUTRA. Translated from the Sanskrit with an Introduction and Commentary by Shyam Ranganathan. Penguin Classics India, 2008. 319 pages. During a recent visit to the Jaipur Literary […]
March 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – March
“Rhymes can make sense of the world in a way that regular speech can’t.” Hip hop mogul Jay-Z (Sean Carter) says it better than I can. It’s no coincidence that […]
March 5, 2019
On Novels that Span a Lifetime
There’s a famous theory (attributed to Aristotle, though in reality the result of misinterpretations of his work made by Renaissance humanists) that a good tragedy should follow the three unities, […]
February 27, 2019
In Defense of On the Road
Two years ago, I was sitting in a Starbucks and reading On the Road (aware, of course, of the irony of reading something with such an anti-consumerist ethos in such […]
February 13, 2019
On George Orwell and Sensory Detail in Writing
In a previous blog post on long sentences, I critiqued George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” specifically because I felt its list of rules was too restrictive, […]
February 11, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – February
It’s happening again. Even as we speak, elsewhere—in a college dorm, maybe, or some recess of the internet—a word is changing. Just as “cool” evolved in African-American jazz circles of the […]