CURRENT MISSION

Imagining the "Rendezvous of Victory"

ABOUT ME

"Homo sum, nihil humanum a me alienum puto"

I enjoy many things, from Postcolonialism to the coffee that I take in the morning. I love walking on the beach, specially at nights, and listening to the neverending sound of the sea. A good deal of my life goes on listening to music, reading poetry, and struggling with critical theory and historiography. But at the end of the day nothing is so important to me as human contact, and it's why I admire the idea of CS.

PHILOSOPHY

1. No race holds a monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength and there is a place for all at the Rendezvous of Victory.- Aimé Césaire

2. πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν.- Πρωταγόρας

3. Nihil tam absurdum dici potest ut non dicatur a philosopho.- Cicero

3.نقدِ بازارِ جهان بنگر و آزارِ جهان/گر شما را نه بس این سود و زیان، ما را بس.- حافظ

4. If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of aesthetics, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.- Schiller

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

by trusting people.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I'd always found the "mutual trust" --without which CS cannot function-- terribly awesome and splendid.

Interests

Traveling; hiking; camping; meeting people; talking about historiography, critical theory, postcolonialism, aesthetics, cognitive linguistics and sociopolitics; coffee and cigarette; walking on the beach; laying in the dunes; talking about the Middle East...

• literature
• poetry
• beauty
• coffee
• walking
• politics
• reading
• traveling
• socializing
• music
• hiking
• camping
• beaches

Music, Movies, and Books

Music:

Traditional Iranian, Western Classical (Romantics in particular), Ethnomusic, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Jim Morrison, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington.

Movies:

Don Quixote (Welles), The Weeping Meadow (Angelopoulos), The Colour of Pomegranates (Parajanov),
Saraband (The Great Ingmar Bergman, his Majesty!), Persona (Bergman), Sacrifice (Tarkovsky) Dr. Stangelove (Kubrick), Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch), Dogville (von Trier), Dear Wendy (Vinterberg), The wind that shakes the barley (Loach)
Close up (Kiarostami), Underground (Kusturica)
Once upon a time, Cinema (Makhmalbaf)

Books:

Don Quixote (Cervantes), The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman(Laurence Sterne), The Brothers Karamazov(Dostoevsky), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce), The Process (Franz Kafka), The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat)
Mask of the Red Death (Edgar Allan Poe), Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Friedrich Schiller)
Orientalism (Edward Said), Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault), Metaphors we live by (George Lakoff & Mark Johnson), Roots of Romanticism (Isaiah Berlin)

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

*Traveling along the Iran-Iraq border and collecting Howrami folk tales

Teach, Learn, Share

I can learn everything. I'm eager to listen to people's ideas. I might be able to share some ideas about historiography, literature, and linguistics.

Countries I’ve Visited

Armenia, France, Greece, India, Italy, Turkey

Countries I’ve Lived In

Iran, Netherlands, United States

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