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The Wilde World
I embarked recently on my dad’s intimidating Collected Oscar Wilde. So far it has been accessed solely for plays and the occasional quote from a poem. Now I am reading essays, and an early favourite is, naturally, a dialectic. Vivian: I intend to call it The Decay of Lying: A Protest. Cyril: Lying! I should…
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Via Media
I was once asked to comment on a paper called “How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru” in law school. Montesinos was the Head of Intelligence in Peru in the ‘90s, when Fujimori was in power. Via SIN (how’s that for evocative language?), he bribed his bosses’ way into power. He paid off parliament members, judges,…
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Their, Their Sex.
My closest school friend turned 24 yesterday (happy b’day, deevan!). I am not scheduled to do so for another five months, but her birthday has always seemed like the onset of mine, splitting the year into neat halves: until June 30 I am 23-and-a-bit; on July 1, I am almost-24. For most of my life…
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The Uncoupling of Jesus Christ.
Hope is a long leash drawn in slowly. Wendy Cope, After Prague I came to The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ well disposed to Philip Pullman, and I left with my illusions intact. Pullman tackles the central conundrum of the Christianity: how did the oh-so-radical Jesus leave the oh-so-conservative church as his sole legacy? Pullman’s…
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The Would-be Medici.
It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. …