I am organizing a seminar for ACLA 2012 (March 29–April 1 at Brown) with Northwestern’s Harris Feinsod on Bad Reception, Missed Connection, Clogged Circulation. This seminar is devoted to the ships in the night of literary history: the near misses, the affinities that should have formed but didn’t, the treacherous reception contexts that betrayed the promise of circulation. How can focusing on these blockages and (to use a term of Roland Greene’s) obversals enrich and complicate comparative literary study? As for my own paper, in a cross-over between two research interests of mine, the role of popular genres in the early twentieth century and the history of Indian writing in English, I’ll be discussing “Indian Love Lyrics” from Yeats to Tagore to E.M. Hull. I may or may not learn to sing the “Kashmiri Song” by Amy Woodforde-Finden.