Coffee beans on the tree
Beans lain out to dry
The grinding and roasting room [best smelling place in the universe]
Coffee needs shade, and so it’s grown under the canopy of other trees.
Photos taken in March of 2014 at the Golden Mist Coffee Estate near Madikeri.
Life from Elsewhere: Journeys Through World Literature by Amit Chaudhuri
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“Life from Elsewhere” is a collection of essays written by writers from around the world on culture, multiculturalism, and the struggles of life (and writing) in a culture-infused world. The book consists of an introduction and ten essays by authors from India, Congo, Argentina / Spain, China, Israel, Syria, Palestine, Iran, Poland, Russia, and Turkey. It’s being put out to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of a program that seeks to translate more global literature into English (English PEN’s Writers in Translation.)
This was a hard work to rate, and so you may want to take the number of stars with a grain of salt. If you’re part of the niche audience of contemporary world literature devotees, you may love this book from beginning to end. For a more general reader—such as myself–there are golden nuggets scattered among a field of shiny gravel. I found the essays by Asmaa al-Ghul (i.e. “When Ideas Fall in Line”) and Andrey Kurkov (i.e. “Sea of Voices”) to be fascinating, even for the general reader. The former tells the story of a journalist who reaped a firestorm by posting a Facebook picture sans veil, but it offers insight into life under blockade in Gaza. The latter offers a Russian author’s experience of traveling in the Middle East, and the incidences of clash of cultures it offers was thought-provoking.
The countries represented by authors in this book are well chosen. Authors were chosen from locales that would have once been underrepresented in such a work. However, one might question the fact that half of the essays are from countries of the Middle East. While this may seem odd, one must admit that a writer or artist in most of the Middle East faces challenges that a writer from Osaka, Sao Paulo, or Prague would not. This isn’t only addressed in the al-Ghul essay mentioned above, but also in pieces such as those by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (i.e. “Literature: Forbidden, Defied,”) and Elif Shafak (i.e. “A Rallying Cry for Cosmopolitan Europe.”)
I’d recommend this book for ardent devotees of contemporary global literature. Other readers will gain insight into what it’s like to be an artist in a world defined by culture–and particularly fascinating insight into cultures which are threatened by modern literature—and should make up their mind about how fascinating they find said topic. (Otherwise, one may find the book a bit dry.)
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
These aren’t necessarily in any order.
1.) Trekking the Great Himalayan National Park [June]:
2.) Teaching kids at KAMMS and Socare [September & October]: I finished my RCYT course in April and have been teaching kids when I have a chance:
3.) Completing Level I Examination at the Muay Thai Institute [September]:
4.) Riding camels at Pushkar and Jaipur [November]:
5.) Boating on the Ganges in Varanasi [October]:
6.) Wandering around a coffee plantation near Chikmaglur [April]:
7.) Completing the Level III and IV reviews in Kalaripayattu [February & August]:
8.) Touring the Glenloch tea factory in Sri Lanka [May]:
9.) 108 Surya Namaskara Against Child Trafficking [March]:
10.) Junk boat tour of Ha Long Bay, Vietnam [December]: This may be jinxing us to put it on the list, before we’ve been (we leave tomorrow) but I’m optimistic that our three weeks in Vietnam will be awesome, and I’m told Ha Long
What to expect in 2016? Lilla and I will be moving back to the States around mid-year. (To where, exactly, remains a mystery.) In January and February I’ll be doing an RYT-300 course to round out my 500 hour yoga teacher certification. I plan to make at least one more trip to Thailand to MTI for Level II. I’d also like to complete the 10-day Vipassana meditation course before returning. Lilla and I are thinking about another Himalaya trek for the summer.
I’ll also be continuing to work on press handstand progression, as that’s been a focus for me of late and I still have a ways to go.
Taken in September of 2014 in Bangkok
“The title of this post doesn’t make a lick of sense?” you say.
But it does. This is my 1,300th post, and I’m going on travel for a few weeks to train muaythai at the Muay Thai Institute in Rangsit, Thailand. I may or may not post during the next three weeks depending upon what kind of pummeling I sustain to the brain-pan region.
The photo above as taken about a year ago on the Chao Phraya in Bangkok.
I’ll leave you with a thought for the day: If everybody around you holds the same beliefs as you, you’re not a member of a community, you’re a member of a cult.
Not these mountains. These are in Peru. But like these mountains.
My blog will be on a three-week hiatus while my wife and I are trekking in Himachal Pradesh.
I’ll be back posting sometime around the beginning of July.
Best Wishes,
B.
I’ll be abroad for the next few days and will take a hiatus from posting.
All the best,
B.
Taken in December of 2014
From the Pest-side looking toward the Palace (Királyi Palota) on the Buda-side. The Chain Bridge (Széchenyi lánchíd) over the Danube is in the foreground.
Taken in December of 2014 in Budapest
Built by the company of Gustave Eiffel, this train station opened in 1877.
I’m fully adjusted to life in the tropics. I’m used to days that are almost exactly half light and half dark year round, and annual temperatures that vary less than 10°C from the year’s low to its high. However, I just got back from Hungary, and was reminded of some of the redeeming features of the great, white, whitest-of-white north.
Fortunately, we were eased into the winter experience. When we arrived, it looked like this:
By the end it looked more like this:
So beyond visiting family, why travel into the arctic chill?
9.) Christmas markets: If you’re tired of this year’s mass-produced doodads and gizmos churned out of massive factories in China, you can see some new and interesting wares within these markets (though there’s no escaping mass-produced tsotchkes altogether.) In Budapest’s markets, you can even find blacksmiths to custom make your metal needs.
8.) Skating and winter sports / activities: In India one has three choices for viewing or participating in sports: cricket, soccer, or–did I mention–cricket. It was refreshing to see skiing, skating, etc. on TV and in practice.
7.) Vivid sunsets: Something about the high latitude and proclivity for cloud cover made for brilliant colors, and you can’t miss the sunset because it happens at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon.
6.) Street food: There are so many outstanding high-calorie food options too keep your internal furnace burning.
5.) Color: There’s no place that outdoes India in the brilliant colors department, but villages like Szentendre are no strangers to vivid colors–though not necessarily ones that assault the eyes. Besides the warm yellow-orange that is ubiquitous throughout the region, there are a range of colors that one doesn’t see everyday and that I–as a straight man–have no idea of the names of.
4.) Concerts: Music is big in Hungary, and there are bills for Christmas concerts all over the place. That said, we missed most of the Christmas music in favor of going to hear a popular Dixieland Jazz band and a New Years Concert that mostly rock-and-roll cover songs. Dixieland Jazz isn’t what one expects in Hungary, but it’s nice to see American art forms other than Hollywood cinema and television programming that have a huge following abroad.
3.) Finding your inner child: If you grew up in a wintery place–as I did–the cold, colors, and lights of the holiday season transport one back to the simple and energetic time of one’s youth.
2.) Hot beverages: You develop a renewed appreciation for coffee, tea, mulled wine, and hot cocoa when it’s freezing.
1.) Kürtőskalács: If you don’t know what this is, it’s worth the visit for it alone. It’s one of the best wintertime snacks anywhere in the world, and is hand’s down the best cylindrical food in existence.
