A few years ago, some doctor friends of mine moved from Tennessee to the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury Crossing. This CD was created to commemorate the transition. The cover is from an 1841 public health pamphlet I found in the Library of Congress website.
For the past several years, my anthropologist friend has been doing research on the geopolitics of the triple-border between Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. It’s a fascinating topic, and I’ve enjoyed getting updates and reading suggestions from a growing expert. This mix was made as a celebration of the Triple Frontera and its multiple identities, about peoples and languages and rivers and borders.
Created for the 10th anniversary of a trip I took to India, with some of the people who are still my closest friends. The mix itself was a long string of lovely inside jokes (the title itself was one of them), of music we’d talked about during long conversations in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Nainital.
The first world map to include the Western Hemisphere was drawn in 1507 by an Alsatian cartographer named Martin Waldseemuller. Its initial printing ran a thousand copies, of which only one complete version—purchased recently by the Library of Congress for $10 million—is known to exist. Even in the tantalizingly low-resolution copies available on the Internet, Waldseemüller’s map is a thing of beauty, brilliantly illustrated and full of written descriptions and details about seas and cities and rivers.
cc Shahram Sharif/flickr
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, by V.S. Naipaul (Random House, 1982), 430 pp.
A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1990), 307 pp.
One of the advantages of getting your reading material from public libraries is finding handwritten notes and comments from your fellow readers in the pages of a borrowed book. Usually these are limited to inscrutable underlining and earnest corrections of minor facts. Occasionally, though, the comments are more entertaining: angry little essays scrawled in the margins. These protestations are, I would submit, one of the more gratifying forms of vandalism: a reminder to the solitary reader that he is but one of a league of citizens through whose hands, over the course of decades, this particular book will pass.