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Monday, February 28, 2011

Bizarre

An infant lying on his back just turned on his tap but there is not enough water, it looked like a a long transparent then film. A lady broke it off and found a similar thinner tube inside and fed it back to the kid.
On an aerial trip in a seat over water. Had to hold to the sides of the chair, brushing off thoughts of what the fall could lead to.

Stories

We were driving to a nearby village to meet relatives. It bein a livestock market day, little away from there we saw oxen being washed in a stream being groomed.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Life in hindsight

Interactions with travelers. The world looks at you and lets you know, you are fat. The world, the mirror, the equaliser. If your family does the same, you revolt. When a nameless face does it, you cry but you listen up. The world like the nurse, pats you for your nise, squeak so you let the world know that you are alive.
The cost of non-reticence in public transport.

The sleep of life

What is that something restorative that lets you place all things personal on a shelf and take off from where you left, after the life is back in you. Like picking up your belongings from the jailer when its time for parole or freedom.

Cartoonists

They take reins of their life way early.

Chalk is my weapon - Backing into Forward, Jules Feiffer.

Al Jaffee too had this sense of need to take control of his life as he couldnt trust his mother to take care of him.

Jacket Art

Somebody else's century
Fungible

The book's buddha face - four faced as Janus but only in the visible half with each half overlapping the other is easily lost in the cliched but hey take a look again. Design by OUTT

Otaku
Drishtee, Saurath
Sandur Lambani
Heterogeneous time
Emil Cioran
Qixia Buddhas
Linear V Circular time

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

New writer

I wonder how else I could be introduced to Breece Pancake's work, if not through Five million head of cattle by Samantha Hunt.
In the essay I like how she tells about herself by telling about an opposite of herself, calls a song a heartache.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

The joy of essays

How to be alone, essays by Jonathan Franzen. In 2003, I heard about his novel from a penpal but never read any work of his. Essays is something I am more likely to read than a novel.
Geri chair
Blues traveler

After coming across Vetted, from the sound of it, I recalled that I meant to look for vatic.
Sound is a way of words to keep each other from going into oblivion.

White flight

Monday, February 21, 2011

Veneer

The dreams that get us close to the flying wings of an eagle, of a colorful pterosaur. Legs slipping down the cliff, but no fear even with an inadvertent hunchback behind. Beneath is the water dating beginning.
A mask to see behind the scenes.

Of Sontag

She always wore pants ( usually jeans) and low-heeled shoes ( usually sneakers), and she refused to carry a purse.
- Sigrid Nunez.

John Berger

Mythology

I move my face
left right slightly up down slowly
a silent photographers directions
so a beam of sunlight
can smother me

This kind of thing
could impregnate me


I wrote this after the cue of sunlight

Writers

Mentors, Muses and Monsters

This essay Annie Dillard and the writing life by Alexander Chee will show your writing guts to you. with sentences like 'Compare yourself to Colette, or Henry James or Edith Wharton.' and 'Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there, and then go every time.'

In The Snow Globe, Jonathan Safran Foer writes about the give and take that goes on between writers.Yehuda Amichai with his A Man doesnt have time poem, the kind that Emily Dickinson says you know its a poem, it takes your head off would influence anyone he comes in contact with.
In 'When Julie met Deb..' her persuasion in keeping at wriitng for seven years hinging her writing life on two editors approval.

Excerpts

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Friday, February 18, 2011

Who am I?

I crawl on my belly at a snail pace
But I have no carapace

I have a foot and no bones
But I make no bones about it

My movements are smooth on slime
But I stop in my tracks on gas lime.

Translating geography

I heard a man proposed in Antarctica.
What is the Antarctica, the Everest of the mind?

Understanding the east and west

Somebody else's century

Hope forever

Whether it be the Berlin Wall, apartheid, the bad old coercive Soviet system, or our own bad old coercive business systems, it seems that any foundations not now built on the realities of human relationship are being swept away by the forces of our time. - Crossing the Unknown sea, David Whyte.

Standing the test of time or falling under.

Restrictions

.. but even during Lithuania's relatively benign interregnum golden period, quotas limied the number of Jews who could practice law. - Al Jaffee, Mad Life

The illustrations in this book are unique with all the mischievous acts that the author was upto as a child.

Kaunas
Prognathic
Keds

Lithuanian Lapta is similar to Indian Gulli danda

How did you view adults in your childhood? Al Jaffee was anti adults.

Fish pond

.. the powers that be decided to poison the pond so that they could get rid of pickerel and bass and horned pout and turtles and stock it with trout. - Mark Vonnegut, Just like someone without mental illness only more so

one question that all adults like to ask kids , 'What will you be when you grow up?'. Mark's 'I should have been a doctor' at 25 from his 9-10 yr old self, made him a doctor.

Once Mark Vonnegut brought home RSV. Contagion does not fear doctor. Therese J. Borchard calls the playroom as 'pink-eye pit' in her memoir Beyond Blue

I talked with Lincoln and Twain
and Dostoyevsky and played
saxophone with Coltrane.
- Mark Vonnegut.


Tree of Hippocrates at harvard from a sapling from Kos.

First do no harm
- Hippocrates
Applies to engineers too. Dont break things while fixing broken stuff.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Does a North rough winged swallow
feel the loss of a feather or two

As the bird whizzes from one end
of the steps to the other, on the bank

does it recognise the feather sailing
like a dart due to reflection

does it feel the loss as much as that
of a flying insect that escapes it

does it feel like the loss of a
toe-nail or an eyelash?

Two owls drop me an insect
when I look at them



How do the birds detect insects?
What is the insects defense?
Crickets are chirping away in India
Is it getting hot?

To a reader

a stack of books
is a bunch of cupcakes

A sauce

claims a domino of chicken pieces and unites them.

Seurasaari

Seurasaari as an open museum, is not going well with me. What are such other jarring notions?
Museums are wonderlands. Salarjung museum is the first one I have been to. As a kid I liked the ceramic dolls.
Why would a cold country celebrate the end of summer? That too with a Bonfire.
The poem reels us in with the mention of place and Vendace but fails to take us along.

Ivory chairs in Salarjung museum.

Stains

Shrimp stain shows on white
Flesh color cloth would hide it.

white school skirts
stained by mud splash
on rainy days

Air displaced

An upright pillow falls
and blows cold air

Luthier

Reading the above poem, I am reminded of the strong odor of cattle's urine, just above where its tail hangs.
Luthier

Perception

legs jagged in

Its spring

the brittle bush with its yellow.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Yin-Yang

The sun is red hot
The earth cool blue.

Relative colors

After looking at Taupe and Sepia apartments
the eyes liken the green of the golf course
to an olive drab

Lake walk

The lake smells of water after sitting with it for a few minutes.
A kid likes throwing weeds into the water. Dried Leaves.
Swallows disappear. Their chatter emerges.
Cormorant flies low. Dunks.
Coots beak into the water like chicks. Shriek.
Men bicycle on water. The bank hides their water-bike boat base.

A Gila woodpecker ona stump is larger than when close to the canopy.

The reflection of an upturned end of a feather along with it makes it look like a dart, an aphid with imaginary feet out for landing.

A cash dispenser of an ATM under repair. Its sensors are weak.

A bubble floats on water momentarily.

As the water moves
so do the contour lines

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Memoryscape

Phyllis Theroux views her brain as an unevenly frozen pond.

If I were to see my memory scape in geography, it would have some chasms and some crumbling edges, nothing that I would be scared to revisit. Two years ago, when we went to the Havasu falls, after going half way into that convoluted tunnel, my legs started shaking and when I was told that I had to climb down facing the rock, I gave up. I will try again. I want to go beyond and see the cascade falls. I want to see the wilderness.

Animal Affinity

I saw Mark Twain's Book of Animals, a while ago, but the text seemed dense. It opens an unknown side of him.

Mountains

When I saw Mt Humphreys in Early Days in the Range of Light, I wanted to know of what others thought about it. After looking at the Married Mens point, I know its not the same mountain we are talking about.

Food Tunnel

If Anthony Bourdain liked his swearing 'Sparingly' in Medium Raw, it would be easier. But thats not going to stop me from reading it. The Last time I read his The Kitchen Confidential, I alienated my friends getting busy making alist of all the French dishes he was talking about.

I like his beginning questions, Why cook? Why cook well?
I want to retain a paraphrased version of it - Why write? Why write well?

no-necked strangers.. unclicheing the cliche

Wiffle ball game

When reading of how Mario Batali wouldnt throw the towel in because of the many people dependent on his kingdom. I wanted to know about his employees

Bottle service

The Brouhaha of memoirs

Some bashing of memoirs
What if I want to write without any healing stories? The power of memoir, a How to Write your Healing story.

After looking at Getting a Grip of Monica Seles ( the cover picture reminds me of the lead singer of Maroon 5) and Open of Andre Agassi, I want to know all about them but not putting in so much time.
Reading a description of Getting a Grip, it seems like a revelation that Seles had to be away for a while. Human behavior is so underknown. As a child, it is understandable that a stab to a sportswoman would just mean a trip to hospital and getting well. But even now, it wouldnt follow for me the emotional requirement to understand the stab event, react to it and heal from it.
In so many events of the last century, there were crowds taking part in the same. When it is a personal event, it must take alot to eve know your coordinates. In the cairo event, looks like in the spirit of crowd, things are taking their course but there is the aspect of some families with loss.

Not made up

I do not know why I am not open to reading made up stories on events in life. I was just about to drop this book when it said it had all of it. It meant in the diary form. Is it fiction? Lets find out.
After coming across Isle of Mull in The Journal Keeper, I looked for a photo of it in the google maps and found Carsaig of Arches. What a landscape in green and rock.
Perelandra

Thurber's bear story

Passion vs love. I would bet on passion that I can light than on love that others quell.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Forsaken

I take to the gate
When the tall frame
is locked
I leap onto it
like an Amazon

Monday, February 7, 2011

Training

My dad taught me
to figure the days
in a month
by situating them on the
crest or trough
of the knuckles and
in between.

I am told infants
explore them all
till they reach
the thumb

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Variable lives

One cannot insert a dead friend back into ones life

Imagine our lives as tooth paste or fancy perfume bottles. There are some which have more glass than mercury. How much of it do we want, as much as our bottle can fill.

Dictionary

Lookign at the chromologically arranged poems of George Herbert, I feel like using a dictionary as the starting point to write on. Some use for the foreign ones piling up.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Inklings
Davenport
Objects of our affection
Hepplewhite cabinet
Noritake
White and blue Canton from Kwantung
sea burial
Minton set

Looking at Chinese wedding lamps, I am reminded of another tradition. Korean wedding ducks
Doulton
wedgwood
Staffordshire
Spode
Quartermaster
Dorothy Draper

Pictures as story tellers

Hopi Summer
.. the Hopis I spoke with were fascinated to se historic images of their communities. - Carolyn O'Bagy Davis


The curiosity of one to trace photos of land and people connects the children to their roots and the lying rocks to once hoisted boulders.

I have a picture of a house and a tree in a book.
Odd corners
John Le carre
Stanislaw lem

Borges Lectures

Seven Nights

Everything connects, but it is Borges alone who can make these connections, across cultures, across literatures, across languags, across time. - Alastair Reid.

Icelandic sagas