The War Room
I listened to The Moonstone while painting a banker’s wife, and the week’s royal news turned a Victorian mystery into a current one Monday, the Studio, North Light I paint portraits for a living, in a studio over a frame shop in Salt Lake City. Mostly commissions. Retiring judges, university presidents, somebody’s mother from a … Read more
The London humor weekly drew India as a tiger to be put down, and within twenty years Indians had started their own Punches and turned the pencil round Sunday, a Stack of Old Cartoons My English client lent me a bound volume this week. It is heavy and smells of cellar. It is a year … Read more
Ravi Varma was India’s great portraitist of the 1800s and then became something bigger with a printing press, and a joke about motorcycles explained to me what he had made Tuesday, Cleaning Brushes All year I have been reading and listening about nineteenth-century India through the eyes of writers. This week, at last, I found … Read more
A piece about romance turned into a spreadsheet arrived while I was listening to the coldest marriage offer in English fiction, which is also a job offer in Calcutta Monday, an Engagement Portrait The couple from last spring are back. The organized ones. They are married now and want a second picture, for his parents. … Read more
An evening of Kipling 1894 stories with a five-year-old, a wolf pack that adopts a human child and a royal row about who belongs to which family Monday, My Sister House Monday evening, babysitting my nephew at my older sister house in Salt Lake City while she and her husband went to a parent-teacher conference. … Read more
A Bengali poet who wrote in English and French, died at twenty-one and left a poem of grief that made me cry in the library Wednesday, the Library Wednesday afternoon in the library at the university, reading for my seminar on nineteenth-century British and Indian literature. This week: Toru Dutt, a Bengali poet born in … Read more
The extraordinary friendship between the Empress of India and her Indian teacher, the royal family fury it provoked and what happened to the memory after she died Thursday, Research for My Paper Thursday, working on my term paper for the nineteenth-century literature seminar. I chose to write about Queen Victoria Hindustani journals and her relationship … Read more
Our library book club tackled Wilkie Collins 1868 novel about a cursed Indian diamond and a family that turns on itself, and the royal parallels wrote themselves Wednesday Evening, the Main Library Book club at the Salt Lake City Main Library again, the same group as always: two retired teachers, the nurse, the law student, … Read more
A Victorian travel classic written by a sister who travelled with her brother through India in the 1830s, and a week that ended with my own brother on my porch Saturday, a Sunny Porch Saturday, on the porch of my parents house in the Salt Lake suburbs, wrapped in a blanket, reading Emily Eden Up … Read more
Judges rank the sharpest political-strategist diary satire blending campaign anecdotes and real headlines LONDON (July 2025)—This cycle’s review of political strategist diary comedy concluded with judges praising entries that repurposed a genuinely absurd real headline as effective professional teaching material. The panel rewards submissions that find real pedagogical value in an ostensibly unrelated news story … Read more