“To write a good book you have to have certain qualities. Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina. Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination…” —Iris Murdoch, at the 92Y
JNU Violence: JNUSU President Briefs Media Hours After She Was Brutally ...
Photo of the Day: Drifting Along in Cambodia
A little girl drifts through a floating village on Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia on November 14, 2013. (Tartarin2009 [travelling]/Flickr)
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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myuyQXJQD7Q)
Reblogged from Living in the Modem World:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P7xykJkgSI&w=625&h=352]
Second Life has always been a powerful medium for artistic expression, whether it be 2D (through the creation of photographs and machinima taken…
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REVISITING NATIONALISM – 1
REVISITING NATIONALISM – 1
Prasanna K Choudhary
NATION, NATION-STATES AND NATIONALISM
1648.The Thirty Years’ (1618-1648) European War ended in the Treaty of Westphalia. In this devaststing war, fought in the background of the Reformation, the…
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अनन्त का छंद – 7 प्रसन्न कुमार चौधरी घ. चेतन अस्तित्व सामान्य 96. अपने जीवनयापन के क्रम में मनुष्य निरन्तर अपनी समृति में डूबता-उतराता रहता है, अपने होने के अनेको अर्थ उलीचता जाता है, अपने को परिभाषित और पुनर्परिभाषित करने की ज़द्दोज़हद में उलझा पाता है । मैं नहीं जानता मैं क्या हूँ, मेरा मन भटकता फिरता है । ऋग्वेद के एक श्लोक का कुछ ऐसा ही भावार्थ है । स्मृति ही भौतिक जीवन के परस्पर विरोधी…
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Tiger Bay, Cardiff, 1950, Bert Hardy
Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln has excited great debate between reviewers, historians, and commentators. Here, Kelly Candaele leads us through the many strands of the argument:
One of the most gratifying aspects of Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln has been the debate that its release has generated among historians and journalists, a debate more important than the movie itself. What were the complex dilemmas that Lincoln faced as President? What were the political realities and conduct of the time? How should we interpret the decisions that Lincoln and others made? What role did slaves and free blacks play in their own liberation?
Despite the fact that the film focuses on a short period of time in Lincoln’s presidency and deals primarily with the political cut and thrust associated with the passage of the 13th Amendment, there is a real sense in which the film can be described as deeply philosophical. Lincoln is portrayed as a man of discipline, concentration, and energy, all characteristics that sociologist Max Weber defined as part of the serious politician’s vocation. By forging an effective and realized political character — one aspect of Weber’s definition of charismatic authority — an astute politician can change the nature of power in society. By controlling his all-too-human vanity, he can avoid the two deadly political sins of lack of objectivity and irresponsibility. For Weber, a certain “distance to things and men” was required to abide by an “ethic of responsibility” for the weighty decisions that leaders are often required to make.
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IMG_8041 by Pooja Pant
This is the one and only original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The Morgan Library and Museum displays Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in Pierpont Morgan’s historic Library until January 13, 2013. Dickens wrote his iconic tale in a six-week flurry of activity, beginning in October 1843 and ending in time for Christmas publication. He had the manuscript bound in red morocco as a gift for his solicitor, Thomas Mitton. The manuscript then passed through several owners before Pierpont Morgan acquired it in the 1890s.
It reveals Dickens’s method of composition, allowing us to glimpse the author at work. he began writing the story in October 1843, completing it in only six weeks. His apparently contiguous pace of writing and revision was urgent but moldly confident. The interlinear revisions increase the story’s vividness: text is struck out with a continuous looping movement of the pen and replaced with more active verbs and fewer words to achieve greater concision. Dickens sent this manuscript to the printer in early December, and the book was published in time for the Christmas market. [The Morgan, 2012] (photo: yyz2nyc)
'Naitaavad enaa, paro anyad asti' (There is not merely this, but a transcendent other). Rgveda. X, 31.8.
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