Rumi - The Book of Love

Yesterday, it was Milad-un-Nabi or Prophet Muhammed's birthday. Today, I picked up 'Rumi - The Book of Love' - 'Poems of Ecstacy and Longing' with Translations and Commentary by Coleman Barks from a forgotten corner of my bookshelf and started reading it.

I bought this from a Chennai bookstore in 2014 when I was actually looking for the poet Rilke's work.

Jelaluddin Rumi is a Sufi mystic and poet who belonged to the time 1207-1273. Sufis call Rumi the 'Qutb' of love or the 'pole' of love, the other two 'poles' being Gilani, the pole of power, and Ibn Arabi, the pole of knowledge.

Rumi's poems talk of surrender. Coleman Barks goes on to say that his poems appeal as much to 12-year olds as to older people.

He says a creative writing teacher on the prime-time show Judging Amy, suggests that his students read 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Essential Rumi' to learn how to write.

Donna Karan reads Rumi on a fashion runway show that showcases her new line.

Madonna and Demi Moore read his poems on a Deepak CD.

What's the reason for this Rumi-mania?

xxxxx

Today, I read 1. Spontaneous Wandering.

In this collection, my favorite poem was 'Where you love from'

xxxxx

Comments

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang - A Book Review

This book has been on my TBR since the time it was featured in The New Yorker in 2019. I bought the Kindle edition recently and read it over 2-3 days. The author Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer who has written the novel, The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She has received the Whiting Award and was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta magazine. Wang has been diagnosed with a slew of health issues: schizoaffective disorder— bipolar type, idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, fibromyalgia, complex PTSD, dysautonomia/POTS, chronic Lyme disease, and the extremely rare cotard’s delusion and capgras syndrome. Wang calls her book “the collected schizophrenias” to include all the diseases that go into this basket, including schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, and schizotypal personality disorder. Since she was into psychological research herself, her awareness about these matters ...

My Book Review of 'Bitch Goddess for Dummies'

Recently, I attended a zoom session on chick lit by the Chennai Lockdown Literary Festival (CLLF). In the session, one of the speakers was Maya Sharma Sriram. I was so impressed with the way she conducted the session and answered the questions that I decided to pick up her chick lit novel, ‘Bitch Goddess for Dummies’ brought out by Rupa Publications in 2012. And I was not disappointed. I’m not sure if I was biased toward the book by the personality I had seen on zoom or not, but I quite enjoy chick lit and have read several chick lit novels in my thirties. So the novel is about a 27-year-old woman Mira Iyer who decides to transform her personality from good girl to ‘bitch goddess’ to deal with the people in her life. Her mom who is constantly trying to fix her up with some eligible guy so that she can get married and Sanya, the real office bitch who is always cosying up to their bosses and vying for a promotion, are just two of the people in her life causing her angst. So it’s go...

Ray Bradbury and Ma Perkins rule my heart

Ray Bradbury is a literary giant. I read one of his short stories recently. This prompted me to go looking for his book of short stories that I'd picked up years ago, which was languishing unread in my home library. The book cover tells me he is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer prize special citation, winner of the 2004 National medal of arts, and a couple of other literary honours. This collection of stories is called ' We'll always have Paris'. But this title story is not my favourite. This one is about two men. A married man who leaves his sleeping wife in the room and goes out for a walk, following another man who leads him through the streets of Paris only to kiss him goodbye. They don't understand each other's language. The way the story was told, I took this to mean he was gay and was checking if the married man was, too. But the married man who was charmed with this man decided he wasn't and went back to his sleeping wife, forgetting all about t...

Ash Talks Books

Search This Blog