links for 2008-11-29

The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura (1904)
"There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence [...]

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reviewing reviews

breaking news! I received my first invitation to review a book published just a few months ago by Cambridge University Press. As luck would have it, it’s a book I was dying to read the moment I saw it in the CUP bookstore (on one of my regular Forlornly Covet That Which Is Wildly Beyond [...]

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Even when they are evil, they are incompetent

It was perhaps inevitable: yesterday afternoon, agents of Malaysia’s Home Ministry breezed into the biggest bookstore in KL, Kinokuniya, and confiscated all of Farish Noor’s books. I say inevitable, given what Farish is to Malaysia: a kind of Socratic gadfly patrolling the borders of Malaysian politics, tugging here and prodding there at the unquestioned assumptions [...]

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Only Collect

This should be a fledgling historian’s maxim & I wish someone had told me this earlier. When you start out studying history — when you begin as a graduate historian, you are nothing; you are not even the history books you’ve already read, because you’ve probably misunderstood or not appreciated some fundamental aspect of them. [...]

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if I don’t finish my Ph.D., Dostoevsky will understand

The direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia — that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms. [...] I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow-minded… As a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the [...]

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links for 2008-11-16

Obama's wi-fi White House speaks to the YouTube age | World news | The Observer
I think I <3 you, President Obama
(tags: obama america newamerica technology hope elections2008 future)

Haji Noor Deen Master Calligrapher | Islamic Arabic Chinese Calligraphy | Intro Page
the two greatest calligraphic traditions in the world come together in one marvellous whole
(tags: art calligraphy [...]

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bookporn #37: singapore national library, or, Contraband

the Singapore National Library is quite a marvel: steel and glass wrought into elegance manifest. It is much taller than its 16 storeys suggest, for each floor is lavish – positively indulgent – with its space. From certain angles on the outside it looks almost like bookshelves

from other angles, more like science fiction –

And [...]

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links for 2008-11-11

Scenes from Antarctica – The Big Picture – Boston.com
my mind is not big enough to contain these pictures
(tags: antarctica photography beautiful)

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bookporn #36: asian civilizations museum, singapore

Islamic calligraphy comes in a bewildering, beautiful array of scripts. Copying the Qur’an is a sacred act, and — so I suppose — extreme calligraphic exertions are one way of demonstrating extreme piety. One of the most demanding scripts is the ghubar script — literally, “dust script” — and it requires that the scribe produce [...]

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links for 2008-11-07

Singapore Literary Pioneers
biographies of prominent Singaporean writers in all four national languages
(tags: research literature singapore biography resource explorethislater)

P’u Sung-ling: Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio
full free online translation of the Liaozhai Zhiyi (!)
(tags: china mythology free translation)

John Milton 400th Anniversary Celebrations – Paradise Lost
A full reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, available "soon" (WHEN, DAMMIT) on [...]

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