Can The Dead Flag Blues ever be a kid’s song? I didn’t know English very well the first time I heard it, so the lyrics didn’t sink in except for two lines: “We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death,” and “I open up my wallet, and …
Songs of Civilization #1: Godspeed You! Black Emperor — The Dead Flag Blues Read More »
The concept of history in Tibet — at least since the 7th century, when King Songtsen Gampo ruled — is inextricably tied to Buddhism as a larger framework of Tibetan culture and identity. The very first works of Tibetan historiography — the Annals, the Chronicles, and the Testaments of Ba — are tellings of the …
A personal history — the historicity of Tibetan rnam thar Read More »
When I was younger, I thought there were two basic ways you could approach culture. The first was to immerse yourself in the cultural canon, consuming everything prestigious and universally revered by “the critics.” This approach has its merits, but it can be constraining. By definition, whatever is universal cannot touch the particular. You can …
As soon as I arrived, I randomly picked this book in the institute’s library, expecting it to be a short and lighthearted novel –– a perfect way to start my reading routine in the new environment. However, Such a Long Journey was a long and exhausting read, like Gustad’s dense life. There is an excruciating …
This is a good book that could have been great. I have been interested in effective altruism since I stumbled upon Practical Ethics by Peter Singer almost by chance at my college library. The reasoned perspective on doing good was seductive to an intellectually curious law sophomore, growing disenchanted with the moral foundations of juridical …
Audre Lorde is poetry and poet at the same time – it starts with her name, candidly justified on page 24 of my Penguin Modern Classics edition of Zami: “I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey, and would always forget to put it on, which used …
“This is a mock-up letter created to communicate with my friends soon to be and thus gone.” Dear S. I am happy to know you are fine and I am grateful for your letter. Once again, I apologize I wasn’t able to make it to your birthday party this year. As I mentioned, your birthday …
Letter to a friend: what does it mean to be a Buddhist practitioner? Read More »
I met him in a night without any tinge of specialness in it, at a late session of a movie theater downtown. The movie playing was Accattone, and this session was unusually empty – just me, him, and a man who seemed to be drunk and was just looking for a comfortable place to spend …
Adam Curtis still manages to mesmerize me. I vividly remember watching his 2016’s Hypernormalisation just a few days upon its release. I was impressed, but nonetheless a bit disappointed due to what I believed was a fatal flaw in Curtis’s reasoning. He seemed to believe that the oversimplified world we were then inhabiting came to …
Murakami has a way to bewitch his readers through a bluntly mundane approach to the surreal and unpalpable. His writing entrances us in a world that is half magical and exotic, half intimate and familiar. This suspense – the way it pends from one side to the other, never really firmly landing in none – …