Lion man

Part of the Pride
Paddatjie, my colleague tells me is pronounced as padykie and is a little frog. Padda is a frog. I overheard that Afrikaans is a language just a few months ago at a birthday party. He says that it is very similar to Dutch.
Kudu
Eternal enemies documentary. Lions and hyenas, one preying the young of the other.
White eye

Likeable Experimenter

Carrying the heart
Lazzaro Spallanzani

Why are unicorns always under attack?

The Natural History of Unicorns

Ctesias
Chiru
Kiang
Verteuil Tapestries
Khutu
Takin
Unbelievable SDZoo
okapi
Rishyasringa
While most animals have horns on their heads, tusks grow downwards. If man had some strong weapon like those sharp things, how different would our evolutionary path have been?

When things breakdown

Medical Mysteries
Tree Man from Indonesia makes us appreciate our functional immune system.
TMAU

Fair Day

Can a person who judges have mercy?

In a crystal ball

I should have written this long time ago, when it happened.
Have you ever felt like you are in a crystal ball?
A month ago, I went stargazing with friends. Four peaks ecen though very close to the freeway was far enough from th Phoenix city lights that only one side of the view had a hint of civilization. If you turn your back on the city, above and around you is a multitude of stars. There is the Milky Way. As shooting stars went, they became as common as dragonflies near a water source. We waited for the Orion to appear, not in the magical - whole of it at once, but in his imperfect, incomplete form with parts of his body showing up with patience on our part like a baby making its way from beneath the mountains. During my undergrad, I used the university telescope and the night I saw the ring around Saturn, I went home like Alice who is just back from her rabbit hole excursion. That was a time when I thought reading Antony and Cleopatra (keeping my engineering books aside during a college festival) would immerse me in their world and I will still be safe, back in time when my professors and the student world is ready to go over the lessons. The easiest to remember was Cassioepia. Easiest to spot too. When I looked at Pleides, the detail even through my binoculars got it alive for me. When I was showm Andromeda, the concept of light years picked from Carl Sagan's novel Contact still seems like a fairy tale. When I was told that it will take over a year to follow some points and see a good chunk of it, I started relating it to birdwatching. Seasons. I once had a very beautiful dream where I saw all the zodiac signs and clearly in their meant shapes.
I recall 'Two on a Tower' by Thomas Hardy, imagining as the person who looks to the sky.

Persona

Is persona free from fate?

Poem

When I read A Blessing, a poem by James Wright in poems about horses, I leapt at the last sentence. I recognise this reaction. The same one when I read it last time.

Recently Billy Collins against expectation did not consider rap as poetry. A friend considers unrhyming poetry as rap.

I like poems. I like songs. I like music. I like lyric.

One is not other.

What is Poetry? A posy that you want to add to your basket. A gadget that you know of it from its effect but not what it is. A Swiss army knife.

Throw back

Yesterday afternoon
I went on a walk
AC inside was too cool
Next to the bushes
breathing in
I was reminded of
white milk icecream
that we had on sticks
sold in blue cart on wheels
by a hawker
Was it the squeezing of self
to take in the melted juices?

Back inside I had momentary
cold and sneeze from the
pollen/milk icecream.

Proximate nature

Crow planet
If you tell me that you havent seen a young crow, I will believe you. But the author wont. She says " .. it is unlikely to be true... The problem is that we equate youngness with smallness, a mistake when it comes to most birds". Its through such breaking of our uninformed notions about crows, that the author makes us aware of the ubiquitous bird, its nesting behavior, its smartness.
Quoting Louis Pasteur that 'chance favors the prepared mind' she urges us to know more about our home ecosystems, get out walking and do the bird watching right outside our house instead of bringing our scopes out after driving hours to the other place called wilderness.
Bat box
Dec 22,2009

Aftermath

What happens to the passion
of artists like Jackson Pollock
when they die?

Next stop Getty center

By 1830s Victor Hugo was all Nostradamus about architecture being replaced by the products of printing press. But in 1420's, Cyriacus believed that ancient monuments were more crucial than texts. On travels as an accountant, Cyriacus was very fascinated by the ancient monuments in Venice, Alexandria, Constantinople. He set about travelling around and documenting all the sites of the ancient world. He turned the focus of the people from texts to the physical monuments.
To wake the dead

Dec 27,2009

When are you done appreciating art

When you cam move onto the next
when you are hungry or angry
when you are tailgated

Sociology

Global Sociology, Introducing Five Contemporary societies begins with Japan. Sadly, my book has only two societies, Japan and Egypt.
Reading about Japanese children blocks being big and involving teamwork, I want to knwo mroe about other societies.
Reading of deviant behavior, I want to know more about what holds the 'culture' in place. If there is a mechanism for preservation or flexibility is a part of it. Japan, small still has half of US population. In the beginning the author talk of its culture being open to influences, yet to know how it assimilates the deviances.

Morning tidings

Mocking bird just woke up at 5.50

An hour later, clouds rolled out like fish scales end with a thick edge.

Sky Harbor's heavy purse

As I got off the elevator at baggage claim, I couldnt help noticing the sparkles on the floor and the newness of a building about to be occupied while there were parts of the walls high above still wrapped in white plastic. Paul Goldberger, in Situation Terminal calling airports a logistical nightmare reasons that the last thing the cash-starved airlines and airport authorities want to think about is aesthetic appeal.

Wake up

The morning sunlight
turns eucalyptus
and every other tree
around into
a flowering acacia

A far neighbor has
a rooster

Starvation

I want to understand what does it mean to have people dying of starvation. 'Aid' if it does not work without production. Reading of The Great Starvation Experiment, I see why someone has to volunteer for this exam. A person in malnutrition state might seem like an ideal candidate for the study. But for moral reason, a starving person will have to be restored to health.

Last night

there were clouds
woke up this mornign with a thought
to write on cross-cultural myths.

Piled paper

Can you start yourself
over again
throwing your
versions of past
as perforated sheets
torn from a note pad
crumpled
trashed

Or is life
a scrapbook with pages
one not like the other
smoothed
to fit into the book

Food in Travel

With Extreme Chocolate , Three Chopsticks and Kabul Nights by Kristin Ohlson, theres more food than ever in the Best American Travel Writing 2008.
When Super Chef edits.

weekends of a pine tree

Sunlight falls on the edge
threads of gold shimmer
like poms poms from
bicycle handles

Above that pine tree
the moon awaits to
bathe the sun basked

The kite wades with the wind

into the depths of the void
into the beyond

If I have to pray instead
how can I believe a
beyond

If the ocean holds the pearl
let me dive

If the heavens hold gods
let me soar

No kite flying

Motherhood

I just hope the snakes don't get out of the cargo hold next.
- Anne Lamott. Traveling Mercies.

Fears out of the collective consciousness crawls into the movie.
Flipping pages of WildLife Encyclopedia, I shuddered at a page with a picture of an adder with its fork tongue hanging. Later when I read that it 'looks menacing but is harmless', I accepted it more. And then I dont squirm at an adder with its little babies, four of them around her in their S shapes. Having just seen videos of camel, dolphin birthing videos, I dont find them revolting.

Life and Death in Slo Mo

Lichen is what reduces rock to soil and sand.
- Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies.

I first came across this word in connection with Robert Frost's poem mending wall. Why is water so pervasive a sculptor? Making bridges, eroding banks. Undoing the effect of fire and gravity. Is all life, war of the elements of nature?

Mirror Test

Yesterday there was a dog in my room. He was making a reconnaisance of all things lying around. He happened to stand in front of a mirror. It didnt register. He didnt show a sign of recognising himself.

Still Life

Apples. Oranges. Jugs. Linen on Table.

The beginning of still Life.

Then figs, pears and exotic.

Looking at Mendelez's hacked water melon dripping, ripped pomegranate with glistening pink pearls, cantaloupe with the seeds still held in the sticky mass, hanging.

Fish. Lobster. They join the rank too. For them its an antithesis to be called still life.

Mendelez's artichokes, cauliflower are the most unexpected.


Master of the Spanish Still Life

Museum

is a dream
with its incongruities

A high outdoor pedestal
Friezes from walls
apart in place and time

you as the curator
maintain the inventory

know what binds the
episodes in your dream

Do you own just this museum?

Do you sometimes loan?

The dreams lost in travel
were they old
would their loss not be felt?

Is there a cast of the original?

Different dreams. different casts
of the same origin.


19th century collection of classical casts, Slater Memorial Museum
pg 76. Travels in the history of architecture, Robert Harbison.

Travel with books

I am on a virtual trip to Jamaica with Lonely Planet and youtube. I like it so far. Dunn falls with its staircases and the greenery. Dolphins shy kisses.

Dreamhouse

I dreamt of this wondeful house which had many rooms and there were many surprises, some sections of the house were engaging. Imagine enrichment. Before dozing to sleep, I was flipping through French Country Kitchens. One main picture I like is of half vertical walls into the dining room which served as shelves for 3 rows of cookbooks on either side.
Another dream that I remember from few years ago had ahouse which had many gadgets all well concealed.

Culture

In Culture and Psychology, Yang (1982) distinguished between two forms of achievement motivation: individually oriented and socially oriented (compare Maehr & Nicholls, 1980).
Growing up, I knew I had to study well as my parents were working hard for my education.

Dreamworks

There is a saucepan with savory snacks and potatoes reduced in milk. I see a man carrying a basket with a lettuce layer which could hold half a dozen cabbages with two cabbages to a side and lots of green from some sort of herb like coriander or dill. Before sleeping, I flipped pages of
Veselka cookbook
Before I slipped into sleep, I heard a bit of Edwin Peterson's Penns Woods west - Hostel with almost a score people going out on their bikes into woods.
My dad and I go on bicycles from a sloping bridge. On the left, we view the church from a higher point of view. The second floor inside with the ground wider by a room width all around.
While going down the bicycle I ended up holding onto the second level railing, while the bicycle and I were at the ground. Ahead of me are stairs. At this angle, I am about to topple. I see that I can get down the stairs? How did I manage to get off the bicycle. I go back up the stairs and bring my bicycle down.

Paralysis

We are every moment conscious of internal power: while we feel, that, by the simple comand of our will, we can move the organs of our body, or direct the faculties of our mind - D Hume

Until one day, you can not instruct your legs to move.
Your lucky legs without polio have led you everywhere you wished, even into the problems that you were afraid of walking into. It is not that the legs themselves that have become heavy and pulled you to the ground. The communication channels have been snapped. The network in your body is now snags. No amount of the sensation inside your body will shock those muscles into action. In your mind, you try again to pump the power that you had from the time you thought.

Where do you derive your principles of poetry from?

In 'Breaking the body' essay in the Bars of Atlantis, Durs recognises that George Buchner derives his principles of poetry from physiology. Others before him from religion or ethics.



In 'the Poem and its secret' - Philosophy could only theorize about the imagination. Its practitioners were virtually clueless about its uses and abuses.

Metaphor

Not knowing another language, culture we miss out on many similes and metaphors which we would have otherwise seen.
Being in an unfamiliar place, listening to an unknown language, attentive to all that goes on.
Of the times spent with friends, each recalls different things.

Hume for lunch

Hume - How do we know a bread is nourishing other than from past experience?
Why elasticity, gravity?

Walking on a pavement, I see a stop sign and realise that this symbol will mean the same thing always. There is no hidden thing in it.

Chose reading him over walking even in a good breeze.

Elasticity allows for a thing stretching to become an another still retain its original shape and content. Stretching our mind to believe in the mutability of things.

Getty Villa

While reading og the compluvium and impluvium, I was reminded of my uncle's house in a village, which had such a thing. Sure enough, it had a grill too like the olden Roman times.

Imagine paitings on your
wall

Sticks and Bears

A sloth bear grabs a branch
with all its limbs in a forest
Tamed, knocking door to door
it hugs a stick
a bride on her way to new home

Letter to Marge Piercy

Stone, Paper, Knife

Dear Ms Piercy

tears as an act of aggression in Ragged ending
make me wonder why men dont cry.

When I lingered at
What you have abandoned
is not behind but far ahead
where we shall never
now arrive

the ending of your poem Being Left

I understood it more.

Reader

Size a nation

As kids, we have read how Japan did a turn face after the war. In all these mentions, they do not tell you that it is a small country. And because of the size, it is easier to work constructively like in Singapore.
Global Sociology

Volatile Karma

Can all the world's
wrongs be absolved
by asking
those who suffer
willingly

Sin eaters

Penns Woods West

Penns Woods West

The introduction celebrates 'the Good land'
Ed Peterson's teacher Miss Murphy made him see the importance of taking care of the land - Penns Wood west
The book begins with a good look at the Leo constellation that augurs spring.
Sugar camps with the maple sap collection portray the sweetface of seasons of February and March
Thorn creek - In all the walks, the description of the colt foot blossoms, bluets evoke the place in front of us. With the sunlight and shade variations on the kind of blooms it is a 3D experience.
After the hike to Mt Davis, the author looks to the skies and reads the clouds. In his cloudwatching, he talks about what the cirrus and cumulus clouds mean for tomorrow's weather. all the great poets had something to say about the cumulus.

Aug 6,2010

Country Driving

To know more about China, I picked the book 'Chasing China: How I went to China in search of a fortune and found a life'. It has the mayhem of the traffic and the author spending time at a house maintained as a part hotel. I didnt get too far with that. I did not expect much with this book too.
'Country Driving''s main appeal is in that the author knows the language of the place. In his travels he takes us along to different geographical places - loess, desserts. While he is covering all this ground tracing the Great Wall, nothing escapes his attention, the narrow alleys of hutong or the yaodong, cave homes.

Aug 12,2010

cotidiano

I was reading Spanish 'Nuevo testamento' aided with an English version of it and a bilingual dictionary. When I came across 'pan cotidiano' - daily bread. I was reminded of quotidian. This made me happy.

Happiness that follows from a sense of achievement.
Life has promise.
Plato on Happiness

Tree and a Machine

An acacia tree with its trunk making its ways in three directions like a circle of girls holding hands and swaying. This lack of edges is so soothing. Its a break from maquin - machines. But the strangeness of machines is not the lack of their soul. Down the line it aids people.

Travel light

Look at any picture
Imagine yourself in it
Now turn to night
and see how
theres the object
in front of you.

Might there not be another
light
that can show more
than what you see
in the day

Womb

We come from the same
deep cave
we care
fed from the same
placenta
theres a phantom cord
that holds us
that tugs me back
to this world
each time I want to
free fall

Austerity

plans in
Spain
Romania

Shouldnt it
be by choice?

Pursuit

of hapiness
ranks with freedom

right to happiness
right to define
happiness

Intersection

is where we meet
where we depart

is where we stop
where we

check the pulse
declare the patient
dead or alive