Archive - Aug 4, 2008 - Article

Our blended imagination

In my eighth year as a child growing up in Iran, I spontaneously composed a stanza, a poem, observing the falling of snow, when something took over and I knew it was poetry I was jotting down in a nylon-covered notebook. That notebook remained in the piles of things left behind. This was the country in which I recited over and over again “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep” for our fifth-grade English class. In the fourth grade, the entire class would stand up from our wooden benches and recite an homage poem to mothers. At home, it was Sohrab Sepehri, “Wherever I am, let me be / The sky is mine / … Our work is perhaps / To run after the song of truth/in the distance between the lotus and the century.”>>>

ex-super power

Americans are fascinated with bigness. We believe we should have the best and the biggest of everything. Only ten years ago, the United States was at the top of the world’s biggest lists in most categories. That is the thing of the past according to Mr. Fareed Zakaria the author of a book entitled; The Post-American World. Consider the following facts: “The tallest building in the world is in Taipei, The world’s richest man is Mexican. Largest publicly-traded company is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, (the) leading refinery is under construction in India, and (the) largest factories are in China. The biggest movie industry in terms of both movies made and tickets sold is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Of the top ten malls in the world, only one is in the United States; the world’s biggest is in Beijing” according to Mr. Zakaria>>>

The Scream (3)

Sure enough, David was gone from his pedestal. Soon to follow were the Venus of Milo and the Nike of Samothrace both skipping town the same day. The Thinker no longer thought. Oslo’s Vigeland Sculpture Park, once like a fully functioning city within a city, was but a ghost town. The Vatican was the hardest-hit, losing Jesus Christ from their famous Pieta. The Virgin Mary now cradled just a bunch of air where her slain son had once laid, expiring. Like their painted brothers and sisters, the marble and terra cotta and stone creatures dreamed up by geniuses from the Far East to the Wild Wild West had inexplicably disappeared>>>

Why doesn't Tarzan have a beard?

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