Archive for January, 2011
The charm of Indian English, filled with literary gems
The Jaipur Literary Festival has become a literary institution and event in India, over the last half decade. “And what would your good name be, sir?” asked the greeter, with the Dickensian formality that only India has preserved. So begins writer Benjamin MacIntyre’s visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival (read it all here), an event [...]
January 29th, 2011Place: “writing from a place, from a community, from a location in the world”
Reconnecting with my Upper Peninsula past in the summer of 2010, I visited the Iron Mountain Iron Mine, one of my most favorite historical locales as a child. Part of the profession of writing and studying history demands an indifference to place. One reason for this is the slim chance of finding an academic position [...]
January 27th, 2011Great listen: World in Words #114 on political language & Tucson
I’ve lost count how many times a story featured on the World in Words language podcast has shown up on my site, but it continues to be a thoughtfully produced weekly pod that clues me in to stories from the news that I might otherwise have missed. (It’s produced by PRI and WGBH Boston, the [...]
January 19th, 2011The city and the country
My city, covered in snow recently The semester has shifted into full swing, even though I have yet to attend a class. I’ve been doing so much reading though, and already have so many dog-eared pages and underlined sentences and bracketed paragraphs, I can tell it’s going to be a theme here for awhile: the [...]
January 19th, 2011Recalling tropical oases…
Today we had our warmest day in awhile in old Atlanta, and the snow by my house is slowly but surely melting away. I am not tired of the winter, in fact I am enjoying it a lot. I soak up the cold season while we have it, because the summer heat is enough to [...]
January 16th, 2011Snow & solitude, a walk through the woods
Serenity. I love the crispness of color that a blanket of white snow brings to everything else around it. It’s like the world becomes black, white, and green only. I took an extra long walk today, walking cautiously along the sidewalks where I encountered some civilization in the form of other bundled-up walkers. But the [...]
January 11th, 2011Through the Disney lens
Atlanta got about five inches of snow last night, and in a city with very little equipment for clearing the roads and a populace that doesn’t often drive in snow, it means the entire city pretty much took a snow day. The free day allowed me time to finish up some projects around the apartment, [...]
January 11th, 2011“You’re a wizard, Harry.”
Honeyduke’s, where I bought a Chocolate Frog for my brother and took in the whole whimsical place. Very few people get to experience their favorite fairy tale world in real life. Unless you happen to be in a movie made by Tim Burton or your imagination is made in the physical world at an amusement [...]
January 10th, 2011Not one or the other, too German to be Turkish
Turks who have spent their lifetimes in Germany would have a hyphenated national identity, using the American pattern of classification. As soon as I finish writing something else on the subject of nationality, and the strange fluidity between identities, one more thing seems to find its way onto my radar. The January 6 edition of [...]
January 7th, 2011A fluid sense of family: on adoption and the global diaspora of orphaned Chinese girls
It’s become a family joke of sorts that I may someday have a family that looks rather like that of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s. That is, a multicultural bunch of kids, a collection of orphans that I’ve taken under my wing. Whether this becomes a reality will remain to be seen, but I most [...]
January 6th, 2011