Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – After the dark year of 2020, I thought it might be nice to talk about poetry and rebirth today. The quatrains or Rubaiyat attributed to the medieval astronomer Omar Khayyam (d. 1131), four-line Persian poems, are often about renewal, and some make special mention of New Year’s Day (Now-Ruz in […]
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Books
Black Lives Mattering: HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ demonstrates that Racism is the True Horror
By Guy Stephen Webster | – Lovecraft Country, a new series from HBO adapted from the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, takes a critical look at the legacy of the controversial but classic horror writer, HP Lovecraft. By doing so it also sheds a light on the mode of literature he famously pioneered: weird fiction. […]
A Drunken Nightingale: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Honolulu’s Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art
Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design | Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art |- Here is a short video made while I was Scholar-in Residence at Shangri La in Honolulu in December of 2016. The grounds are the former mansion and guest house of the billionaire art collector Doris Duke, who filled […]
Fundamentalist Pandemics: What Evangelicals and Khomeinists Could Learn From The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
This essay by Juan Cole was originally published in Tomdispatch.com. See the original for a perceptive introductory essay by Tom Engelhardt. This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time in two countries that think of themselves as […]
Washington Irving, “Legend of the Arabian Astrologer”
Washington Irving, Tales from the Alhambra (New York: Lea and Carey, 1832). Legend of the Arabian Astrologer. IN OLD times, many hundred years ago, there was a Moorish king named Aben Habuz, who reigned over the kingdom of Granada. He was a retired conqueror, that is to say, one who having in his more youthful […]
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Why some Sufis drink Wine
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Quatrain of the Day A search for good times isn’t why we drink: Wine’s not for going rogue or faithlessness. We sip to bring ourselves to selflessness; that is the secret of my drunkenness. trans. Juan Cole, (Whinfield 66) می خوردن من نه از برای طربست نز بهر فساد و ترک […]
Poetry of Uplift for our Plague Year: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Juan Cole’s New Translation)
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Today my new translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is out from I.B. Tauris/ Bloomsbury. I hope you all enjoy it! I make an argument in the historical epilogue to my translation that this volume is an anthology by many poets and that a custom had grown up of […]
A Malignant Contagion: Trumpism’s Mindlessness on Coronavirus and Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’
Chicago (Special to Informed Comment) – Albert Camus’ The Plague evokes the malign contagion of Trumpism — the mindless death cult that contaminates America with its disdain for facts, science, experience, democracy and human life. In Camus’ 1947 novel, the plague begins with infected rats invading the Algerian city of Oran. Like the Nazis who […]
Nicola’s Books Staff Picks for Best New Reads – Support our Indie Bookstores, Stay Sane by Reading
Nicola’s Books | Ann Arbor’s Premier Independent Book Store | 734-662-0600 | info@nicolasbooks.com You need to read some books while sheltering in place to keep sane. Independent bookstores need to sell books to stay in business while their stores are shuttered. It is a match made in heaven. It may seem convenient to order books […]
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