My problem with doing research is that I come across so many interesting topics, and it is hard not to pursue them, and get lost. Sometimes I write books down in my “books to read” list, or download pdfs meaning to read them later. Sometimes I spend hours on things that I absolutely do not [...]
3.
In the morning I cast my net into the sea.
I dragged up from the dark abyss things of strange aspect and strange beauty - some shone like a smile, and some glistened like tears, and some were flushed like the cheeks of a bride.
When with the day’s burden I went home, my love was sitting [...]
I’ve always loved reading literature or watching TV-series/movies about cities and places where I have been/are. When attending high school in Italia, it was a special treat reading a novel in Italian where the protagonist would explain that his mother was from Trieste, and his father from Milano… I lived close to Trieste, and I [...]
2.
‘Ah, Poet, the evening draws near; your hair is turning gray.
‘Do you in your lonely musing hear the message of the hereafter?’
‘It is evening,’ the poet said, ‘and I am listening because some one may call from the village, late though it be.
‘I watch if young straying hearts meet together, and two pairs of eager [...]
Looking through a bunch of old PDFs I have downloaded, I came across this little tidbit from the IFLA Newsletter, June 2007:
Help needed: Directory of National Libraries on Wikipedia
The Standing Committee has discussed the creation of a Directory of national libraries worldwide,
taking into account existing lists such as that maintained by the European Library [...]
From the excellent [i:boekoe] blog on book culture in Indonesia, comes a press release about the Indonesian government. I have translated it below (slightly shortened):
The Indonesian government buys the copyright to textbooks
(From the newspaper Kompas, February 8, 2008)
The Indonesian government has decided to buy the copyright of textbooks for primary, secondary and high school. [...]
by Rabindranath Tagore
An idle, useless fellow he could never keep a job. But of his whims and fancies there was no end.
For instance, in small little wooden frames he would make lovely shell-patterns which, from a distance, looked like some ill-assorted painting: here a flight of birds; or a rough, uneven landscape, with cows grazing [...]
My wonderful friend sent me a few poems by Wisława Szymborska for breakfast. Just yesterday I was riding the subway, which sometimes displays poems instead of ads on the inside of the cars, and came across to wonderful poems that I copied down and sent to her. I love this way of reading poems - [...]
I randomly picked up this book by Martha Nussbaum at the Munk Center library the other night. I remember reading about both the Godhra train carnage, the controversy over the Ayodhya temple and the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat, I think mainly through the Economist.
I am glad that I did, because it was an incredibly captivating [...]
I went to talk today held by the University Bookstore (although, as I would experience first-hand, not physically at the Toronto Bookstore, rather at the wonderfully cozy Hart House library) with James E. Cote and Anton Allahar who co-wrote “Ivory Tower Blues, a University System in Crisis”, and Jeff Rybak, a friend and author [...]
