Monthly Archives: November 2008

Still Autumn.

Light is scarce — morn­ings are bright, but mid-afternoon is the limit of the only after­noon. The land turns dark and the sea­sons are cel­e­brated indoors. The browns of tea and soup broth, the reds and oranges of my books con­tinue Autumn indoors. Par­ents have been obsessed with the ter­ror in Bom­bay. I’ve been strug­gling …

November 30, 2008 – 1:11 am | By ashok | Posted in personal | Comments (1)

Happy Thanksgiving!

My plan for today is to go comatose in front of the tele­vi­sion — I hope your day is just as joy­ous. Lincoln’s Thanks­giv­ing Procla­ma­tion is inter­est­ing read­ing: it is very dif­fi­cult to con­ceive how any­one in the US could have been in a cel­e­brat­ing mood in 1863. The ques­tion is, what is the rela­tion …

November 27, 2008 – 3:34 pm | By ashok | Posted in lincoln | Comments (4)

My November Guest

Just con­trast­ing moods with Frost. Robert Frost, “My Novem­ber Guest:“ My Sor­row, when she’s here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beau­ti­ful as days can be; She loves the bare, the with­ered tree; She walks the sod­den pas­ture lane. The trees are bare, but not quite with­ered yet. It is damp and …

November 26, 2008 – 5:25 pm | By ashok | Posted in frost, personal, poetry | Comments (3)

In Defense of “The Big O” Finale (anime)

Spoil­ers galore ahead; this is a med­i­ta­tion on the last episode of the series “The Big O” has come under fire by peo­ple that ini­tially appre­ci­ated it. To quote Wikipedia: For some review­ers, the sec­ond sea­son “doesn’t quite match the first” address­ing [sic] to “some­thing” miss­ing in these episodes. Andy Patrizio of IGN points out …

November 23, 2008 – 1:07 pm | By ashok | Posted in media | Tagged | Comments (10)

Lament.

At the book­store yes­ter­day I read a chap­ter or two of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumb­est Gen­er­a­tion, which is much live­lier, force­ful read­ing than his blog. His most impor­tant claim, that our unpar­al­leled access to knowl­edge is coeval with a cul­ture of deca­dence which allows the con­struc­tion of entire worlds around our purely ado­les­cent selves, has …

November 20, 2008 – 10:31 am | By ashok | Posted in education | Tagged | Comments (5)