Among the thousands of people who read the latest issue (November ’08) of ‘The Atlantic’ I must have been the only one in the whole world to have bought it off the pavement, and at a fraction of its cover price. (No matter how many times I checked I couldn’t find the price on the cover.) Some well-read soul in Hyderabad must have already gone through it and decided to sell it off though there is still a week for the month to end.
It was a lucky find given the fact that the brand new magazine lay there on the pavement since morning without anyone buying it until I arrived at Abids sometime late in the afternoon and picked it up the instant my eyes caught the title. I got it for only twenty rupees. The issue was also special in that it is a redesigned one and also has two good articles- one was by Andrew Sullivan (Will Blogs Kill Writing?) and the other, a review by Christopher Hitchens of- The World Is What It Is - Patrick French’s biography of VS Naipaul.
But I found only one book on Sunday and it was one I had already read. The copy of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ was too good to miss at just ten rupees so I picked it up. I got this 384 page paperback for just ten rupees. I also saw a book of poems by Raymond Carver as well as a book by John O’Hara, both of whose titles I am now unable to recollect.
I was intrigued when I came across a new prefix, twice in two different articles I skimmed through in ‘The Atlantic.’ The prefix was ‘ur-‘ and was used in these sentences: ‘Forget the male ur-reader’ and ‘…to think Johnny Mercer wrote ur-American songs he didn’t….’ I wonder what the prefix means.
No comments:
Post a Comment