kriticulture

Borges and Me, and Me | Online Only | Granta Magazine Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer My first perception of Borges is Borges himself. In other words: I see Borges. Let me explain. I must be nine or ten and I’m walking my uncle, who’s in his twenties, along the pedestrian Calle Florida in Buenos Aires. I say that I’m walking my uncle because my uncle is blind. My uncle hoped to become a great painter. During his adolescence he’d won important scholarships and prizes, but he went blind from juvenile diabetes, and at this point – he doesn’t know it, but he senses it – he has two or three or four years left to live. So we’re walking and suddenly someone says, ‘There’s Borges,’ and I look and I see Borges and I say to my uncle, ‘There’s Borges.’ Borges is coming toward us and he, too, is on the arm of a friend or a fan and then my blind uncle – who was the humorous type, wickedly funny – shouts ‘Borges! How are you? You look great.’ And Borges turns his unseeing gaze on the p...

It's money that matters - The Boston Globe If you like to think of America as The Greatest Country on Earth, and you’d rather not examine its claim to that title too closely, “The Spirit Level” will not be your favorite new book. On nearly every one of its 250-plus pages, a stark, unflattering graph shows the USA topping the charts among developed countries for some social ailment: drug use, obesity, violence, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy. But authors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, a pair of British social scientists, have another, more enlightening point to make. With striking consistency, they say, the severity of social decay in different countries reflects a key difference among them: not the number of poor people or the depth of their poverty, but the size of the gap between the poorest and the richest.

Yudishthira and Shakuni Gambling was Yudishthira’s worse vice While him and Shakuni were playing dice He lost everything including his wife It’s like he lost his entire life It did not make the Pandavas and Draupadi feel nice They had to go into exile in disguise *** What Bunny Likes Bunny likes carrots. Bunny likes pool. Bunny likes anything Other than school. ***

Skewering Intellectuals - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Stefan Collini on New Left Review at 50 | Books | The Guardian

Aarttee Kaul Dhar To quote a leading English daily, “Mythology is the new cool, legends are repackaged and retold as online games, comics, books and even movies.” According to Monica Tata, VP and deputy GM of Turner International India’s regional entertainment networks, they became the number one channel of the country when they aired Krishna. No wonder legends, myths and retellings are being published anew and re-published to entice the readers. Their ever growing demand in the market compels one to wonder: ‘Is the modern reader now culturally aware or does this indicate a newer and broader trend?’ Most of these Indian mythological stories and retellings have been written very imaginatively with their writers augmenting, localizing and contemporizing the tales. There is a vast repertoire of such tales and their writers. Nabaneeta Dev Sen is one of them. Sen’s ‘Seeta Theke Shuru’ (Beginning from Seeta) is a document that traces three categories of stories inspired by Seeta, the leading...

Badri Raina's greetings below are hereby disseminated among the kriticulture readers. Of all the gods imagined/created by humankind, Shankar seems to me the most ecologically friendly and green; he wears no clothes, so does not shop; he loves even the snake, which bodes well for less deadly animals; he does not live in some lavish palace of art, but up on the mountain top; he loves eating and eros as much as not eating and abstinence; he is a better dancer than Mithun Chakarvarty and Michael Jackson put together; he does not worry about getting a haircut; altogether, a wonderful concept from which globalised consumerism has much to learn. Be well. Badri Raina

By Saahil Raina (Saahil Raina, 7, is in Class 2 at Perce Model School, Boston. Kriticulture is glad to publish this wonderful little tale penned by him amd mailed to 'kriticulture uncle'). Once upon a time, there was a tiger named Alex and a bunny named Jessie. They lived in the rainforest by a pond. It was winter in the rain forest and there was not enough food to eat. Jessie went looking for carrots and Alex, looking for some deer, was with him. First they looked in the pond but there was nothing to eat. Next they looked in a house by a tall tree but there was nothing there. Now they were very hungry and tired. “Look what I found!” said Alex “Magical footprints. Maybe if we follow them,” said Jessie, “we can find a magical place.” Alex and Jessie wanted to follow the footprints so they could find some food. They finished following the footprints. They found a sign that said Magical Kingdom. They walked in the gate and there was another sign that said ASK FOR WHAT YOU WAN...