Hello, I am really looking forward to our conversations about these important books and hope you are also getting fired up for the exchange. Chinua Achebe’s novel begins with a quote from Yeats that I will repeat here as it brings us immediately to what I suspect may turn out […]
Dear Friends, My impulse in creating this seminar was to share with others the type of experience I had when first reading the poetry of Du Fu, an experience that stayed with me through my career as a composer and conductor. One of the greatest ways to be exposed to […]
Dear Fellow Rumi-nators, I hope that you have been able to get copies of the two books for our seminar this summer, The Prophet and the Poet: Reciting God. As I have started to prepare for the seminar, my focus has been on the Ma’navi of Rumi, the first book […]
Dear Friends, In the Edo period (1603-1867), Japanese culture achieved a rare level of refinement. This summer in Toronto we will explore how beauty infused nearly every aspect of life, and everything people saw, touched, smelled, and tasted: Zen gardens, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, poetry, calligraphy, woodblock prints, and dress […]
Ashish, you have given us a great and wonder-filled gift: India You have given us India’s sights: • Palaces and mountains, • Lakes and mighty forts, • Tombs and gardens, elephants, Persian wells, and Punjabi suits, • Temples and mustard fields, • Tools to read the heavens and camels, • […]
Dear breakers-out of cocoons, How to confront tough issues compassionately? This is a question that I keep asking as I prepare for our seminar and reflect on my own literary and actual journeys across cultures. Together, we’ll explore two books by two very different women, Egyptian Alifa Rifaat (1930–1996), and […]
Iceland is stark and stunning. It’s everything the travel brochures say it is: beautiful in a way that’s hard to imagine without visiting. When I travelled to Iceland a few years ago, I couldn’t get enough of the glaciers, waterfalls, geysers and gorges, the vast lava fields and the miles […]
Gung Hei Fatt Choi! (or Gong Xi Fa Cai in Mandarin) Happy Lunar New Year, and welcome to the Year of the Horse! I’m celebrating by rereading two fascinating memoirs about twentieth-century China: Anchee Min’s Red Azalea and Jan Wong’s Red China Blues. With the seminar “Living the Red Revolution,” I’m looking […]
The leaves were showing their first golden tinge when we arrived in the Luxembourg Gardens, and a few had begun to fall on beds still bright with summer flowers. The city’s springtime glories are undeniable, but for me the best time to visit Paris has always been September. It’s […]
So many things meet at the Bosphorus: continents, East and West, mosque and basilica, silk hijab and leather skirt, ancient ruins and post-modern skyscrapers, tribal sensitivities and nationalistic pride, complex history and a hope-filled future, 100 different tongues… May I tell you who I met up with on my recent […]