The City and the Writer: In Berlin with Rajeev Balasubramanyam
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Berlin as you feel/see it?
A Short Description of Cultural Appropriation for Non-Believers, Part II
Read Part I 1. You run a small hotel in Kerala near the beach. 2. Hearing that tourists like yoga, you hire a teacher named Ram. 3. A guest from America, Linda, studies under Ram for six months before going home to start her own school – which she calls “Ram’s Yoga.”
A beginner’s guide to meditation and how it will help you lead a happier life: Rajeev Balasubramanyam
A past Fellow of the Hemera Foundation for writers with a meditation practice, and writer in residence at Brooklyn Zen Center, Rajeev Balasubramanyam offers a beginner’s guide to meditation and explains how it could help us all live more blissfully.
McSweeney’s Issue 51
Ernie Wang’s story “Stay Brave, My Hercules”-which appears in this issue-won the 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize For Emerging Writers. Issue 51 features eighteen brand-new stories so compelling that you’ll read through the night and far into the next day, until your boss calls and warns you that you’re on thin ice, buddy, and better get to the office right away-but we swear it’s worth it.
TORCH: My American Playground
TORCH: My American Playground I was born in England, but my earliest memory is of America. My mother had taken me to a playground at the crest of a low grassy hill. The sun was shining and I was hanging from a purple, spiral-shaped climbing frame, happy, carefree and safe.
“10 Alternative Rules for Writers” by Rajeev Balasubramanyam
1 Cultivate social anxiety and some sort of an addiction. This will prevent you from getting a job. #2 Scorn the work of other writers, preferably anonymously on the Internet. It makes you feel strong and powerful. #3 Do not waste time ‘improving self-esteem’. You are a bad person.
Air France, India to Paris, 1996
As France flirts with political Armageddon, my mind returns to the gentleman with whom I shared a flight in 1996. I was returning from India on an Air France flight bound for Paris. He was sitting to my right, an unshaven, tousle-haired man in his thirties who smoked incessantly and refused all food, drinking only coffee.
A Short Description of Cultural Appropriation for Non-Believers
1. Your new friends Bob and Rita come to lunch and you serve them idlis, like your grandmother used to make. 2. They love your south Indian cooking and ask for the recipe. 3. You never hear from Rita and Bob again. 4.
https://www.frieze.com/article/around-world/
Berlin’s forests – Mapping Memory – Über Grenzen
Berlin’s forests I spend a day a week in one of Berlin’s forests. I set out first thing in the morning with a backpack, a water bottle, spiritual reading, a sandwich, towel, earphones, notebook, and insect spray. The day becomes one long meditation, – a form of spiritual communion.