The Missing Traveler.

rroopeshkumar

“Sound of a Splash”;

The redness of his eyes traumatised the sparkling water, blemishing the blue sky and placing the redness in the very heart of the ocean. It was the day when she, the ocean, had lost someone really special; it ought to be as he remained her only companion who had stayed for this long.

The sea lay dead as the breeze had grew fond of the silence which reverberated from the desert ashore.  In midst of these conditions of turmoil, there lay a man marooned all alone on this island of doom. Along the shore, we find the ruins of the possible ship which might have brought the gentleman to this place.  Years lay testimony to the plight of this unlucky traveller whose fate remain blemished even under the ever bright sun.

The diary which the marooned traveller adored like his companion was filled with the life…

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On Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’ and the Redemption Narrative

Longreads

Like Dante, then, Strayed is on a spiritual journey, beginning in damnation, bound for deliverance. That makes Wild a redemption narrative — and that, in turn, helps explain its popularity, because redemption narratives are some of the oldest, most compelling, and most ubiquitous stories we have. We enshrine nature writing in the canon — you were probably assigned Thoreau and Emerson et al. in high school — but it is redemption narratives that dominate our culture. Among other things, you can hear them in religious services all across the land and in AA meetings every day of the week.

Wild embodies this ancient story. Or, more precisely, it embodies the contemporary American version thereof, where the course is not from sin to salvation but from trauma to transformation: I was abject, dysfunctional, and emotionally shattered, but now I see. This version has more train-wreck allure than the traditional one (being…

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The Insipid Influence of Christopher Nolan (or Complex vs. Convoluted)

symphonyofzann's Blog

I want to take an objective look at the works and influence of Christopher Nolan. I will fail. I am not a fan of the man’s work, but I am a fan of cinema and I care where it goes and how it goes there as I believe it’s telling of us; the viewers. It reflects how we view the world at a certain moment in time, the quality of our analysis of art, it influences our understandings and sets up our expectations of life in many cases. A responsibility many in the industry may not have earned. There seems a strong division whereby people feel you need to worship him as “the Kubrick of our generation” or tolerate him as “the new Shyamalan”. Nolan has become a rather influential figure and I worry this is not for the best. The purpose of this essay, however, is to let you…

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Our Top Picks for the Best Albums of 2014

The Hudsucker

THS Best Albums 2014

It’s been an interesting year for music. From Iggy Azalea’s Fancy blowing up on the radio, to a free record from U2 for every iTunes user in the world, to multiple bands breaking up and reuniting, 2014 draws to a close with some incredible tunes from a diverse mix of musical genres. The biggest story this year might belong to Taylor Swift though who earned the honor of the first platinum record for 2014. Critics and fans alike agreed it was one of her best to date, but there was a lot of music pre- and post Swift’s release worth a listen.

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Five a Day

Becoming Olivia Red

dice

For months on end I have been dreading this.

I had had my suspicions, so much so that I had gone through his phone and searched his car. When I found them, I had tried to ask him about it, but it only started a fight. Feeling like a crazy person, I prayed I was wrong.

But I was right.

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My Favorite Longreads in 2014

Books I Read

I must admit 2014 has been a slow year in reading for me, compared to the last four to five years. There are no excuses, only that other priorities shuffled to the top of my daily/weekly life. The blog remained active throughout the year, but dwindled in both quantity and quality. Nevertheless, I can still recommend my favorite top five #longreads of the year, as I look back through my archives. They are as follows, in chronological order as they appeared on this blog:

1) In a long piece titled “Einstein’s Camera,” Joshua Hammer profiles the photography of Adam Magyar [Medium]:

In a growing body of photographic and video art done over the past decade, Magyar bends conventional representations of time and space, stretching milliseconds into minutes, freezing moments with a resolution that the naked eye could never have perceived. His art evokes such variegated sources as Albert…

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The Clairvoyant chapter VI

groomsdaybook

Waving away the protests of the nurse, Joyce pulled her shawl tight around her and bid me wheel her into the hospital grounds. Refilling her pipe, she talked me through the jobs she wanted me to sort out.

Joyce was fretting about her garden. Positively bosky when she was taken away, her plants had soon fallen into unkept yellows and scattered browns. I declined to expand on the current condition of her grounds. There were so many other jobs that needed my attention. My list, expanding by the second, necessitated a notepad and pen. The vegetable patch, the bill from the butchers, the ground rent to the estate manager, the tobacconists account. The longer the list grew, the more I realised that Joyce knew she wasn’t coming home.

I parked Joyce at the top of the municipal garden. A patchwork of scruffy lawns and scrubby borders that suggested a half-hearted…

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I Ran Away from Pseudo-Paradise

Practical Illusions

I come from a big house with very simplistic dreams.

Growing up comparably well-off (definitely not RICH, but lived excessively nonetheless) in a very poor, corrupt and religious country, gave me unique challenges and bourgeois-like ambitions. Believing that “help” is an essential commodity and that you can become anything you want to be.. of the following: doctor, accountant or a corrupt politician (if you have the money to study or buy your way around it), and at the same time, experience first hand what it is to be poor because your help/best-friend/substitute mother is poor and they wash your underwear, comb your hair, get you a glass of water, give you advice et cetera so they can feed their children. But you- their boss and their (indirect) source of income- you don’t know any better so you throw tantrums at them and curse at them. You blame…

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