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Hope! (Abandon All Ye)
"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it no more!" - Pannapacker ( Read more... ) -
Babble
This be a short blog-reminiscence about the mangle that is baby babble. I imagine this is what I sound like in India, repeating the last two words in Hindi conversation I understood. "Vegetables, vegetables!" I'll say at the vegetable market. "1/2 kilogram! Peas!" Until they catch me speaking in English, which could be as astonishing as a baby ( Read more... ) -
Nehruvian Days
We celebrated Republic Day last week (for me this involved smiling at schoolchildren waving tiny plastic flags on my run), and to celebrate I began reading Ramachandra Guha's megatome, India After Gandhi.
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Speech is Free; Talk is Cheap
Oh dearie me. I've unsettled myself deeply.
First Text: Mahmood
After taking a detour through the hermeneutik, I finally got around to Saba Mahmood's "Docile Agent" article (2001), in which my ("Western" / "Protestant" / "Cartesian" / "liberal") notions of freedom and agency were called into question. An epistemological as well as an ontological ( Read more... ) -
Hermeneutics (1969) and Structuralism and Semiotics (1977)
Fleeting impressions before they fade...
Two odd little books that purported to introduce American literary studies to two foreign styles of thought.
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Oh The Humanities, II
I can imagine Slouka the newly minted PhD on the front lines, terribly upset that the jobs in the humanities are disappearing. Even Louis Menand sounds the same alarm bells ( Read more... ) -
Gimme Science Fiction
Julia finds it odd that my colleagues in Religious Studies and Area Studies are all such oddballs that identify with the topics of their academic inquiry as "ways of life." There's the ethicist who is concerned with seriously living the good life; the tantra scholar who thinks tantrikas were morbid jokesters, who himself, I think, is a morbid ( Read more... ) -
Hitopadeśa
I've been free-translating animal fables from the Hitopadeśa from Charles Rockwell Lanman's A Sanskrit Reader, as per G. Tubb's suggestions. (He also suggested that we all read "The Tale of The King Who Didn't Know His Sanskrit Grammar" from the Kathāsaritsāgara which I completed a few weeks ago. The king is merely mocked by a courtesan for not ( Read more... ) -
Kite Festival
We took a rickshaw toward Amber yesterday. There was not a patch of sky that was not covered by kites. Julia cut down, like, five or six of other people's kites, and I lost three or four kites ( Read more... )