Category: Uncategorized
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An Incomplete History of My Love Life
I have come to realise that my romantic life peaked when I was 13 years old and has been in steep downfall since then. At the time, I was in a strange kind of semi-rural experimental school which had many rabbits and a wonderful badminton court. I had, as always, as now, very few friends.…
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Fallen people / cyclists of Paris
In Paris, there are cyclists everywhere, pedaling, feeling the wind on their faces, zooming and zapping past pedestrians, with their shirts, shorts, dresses, sunglasses. They are not bound to the strict schedule of Ile-de-France mobilité, they do not wait in tram lines, or constantly check if RER B has failed again. They live a life…
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What do Mughal-e-Azam and Korean facials have in common?
In the film Mughal-e-Azam, Emperor Akbar entombs Anarkali, the woman his son loves. Set to inherit the throne of Hindustan, the prince must not fall in love with a mere courtesan, so beneath his social standing. The romance must end, one way or another. And so she is ordered to be entombed alive inside the…
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Who are the fallen people?
Who are the fallen people? The word fall traces its roots to Old English feallan, meaning “to drop from a height; fail, decay, die,” from Proto-Germanic fallanan. The meaning “come suddenly to the ground” is from late Old English. The etymology dictionary online writes, “Of darkness, night, from c. 1600; of land sloping from 1570s; of prices…
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Warp Zone, aka Directorate of State Archives
Anyone who has ever played Super Mario Bros knows about the existence of warp zones: in certain levels (such as 1-2 and 4-2), players could discover hidden areas that gave them access to pipes which allowed the player to skip ahead to a different world, and so it would happen that you could be playing…
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On seeing men
It was only a few years ago that I first read Anne Carson’s The Beauty of a Husband. She writes at the end, “Well life has some risks. Love is one. Terrible risks.…On a June EveningHere’s my advice,hold. Hold beauty.” When I was in undergrad, back in Miranda House, I hated men so much that…
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My London companions
I spent the past few days in London, where I spent the first two evenings by myself but not wanting to completely lose my mind, I decided to have some companionship for the remaining three evenings in the city. You will find below a faithful account of my three London companions: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window:A…
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Mal d’archives
Jacques Derrida wrote in Archive Fever, “It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive, right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself.” In the British Library, while…
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The Fallen People: Paracelsus
Paracelsus wrote in 1538, “Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist,” or all things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison. Born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim in Einsiedeln, Switzerland,…
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Beware the Ides of March
I couldn’t stop thinking about one of the images in the Raphael rooms inside the Vatican of a broken statue lying just below the Cross that replaced it. I couldn’t stop thinking about many things: the elegant movement of the hands of servers behind espresso bars, like hands of Michaelangelo, Galileo’s telescopes that proved heliocentric…
