Buying a discarded volume of poetry Is like buying an old house with Its echoes of past conversations

But if you happen to buy one That was assigned to a class Like the yellowing volume

I have open here, with syllables Counted (luckily in pencil) out At each line, rhymes underlined,

And notes written in the margins Where meaning proved elusive, You are forced to stand witness

To the interrogation of the poet, And by the virtue of fait accompli, Forced to answer for your sympathetic Glance, which may fall across the page.

Stephen Fry’s excellent speech on history and its necessity and meaning to living

A Foreign Policy essay on solving the “10/90” problem in global public health, and the solutions for diseases that don’t have money in them for capitalism’s invisible hand

In view of my recent perusal of “The Gulag Archipelago”, I find the madness that is emanating from North Korea to be fascinating. Pico Iyer in his book “Falling Off The Map” has an excellent chapter on his visit to Pyongyang (among other “lonely” places such as Bhutan, Burma etc) in the late 1980s. And this is an extensive site to look at if anyone of you wants to visit the “illustrious commander, endowed with outstanding commandership art and matchless courage and pluck” of North Korea.

J.M. Coetzee is one of the contemporary writers whose elliptical style of revelation in writing is something I consider a great personal influence. Pondering on soon to come shifts in my life here, I took down the second volume of Coetzee’s wonderful memoirs “Youth”, which been sometimes described as “The Portrait of a Young Man as a Thwarted Artist”. Here is an extract from this book. You may also listen to Coetzee read sections of this work (featuring Ganapati at IBM) over at the Lannan Foundation’s excellent and extensive audio archive of readings.