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

Metropolitan seminars in art

Portfolio 4. Abstraction
John Canaday

I didnt know that Picasso excelled at traditional ways of painting too. that Cezanne did abstract painting. Pines and rocks (Fontainebleu)

Pricing

1. regulates addiction

Words

Will we ever be free of them?
I dont will so.

Gloria Naylor, in the essay The Meanings of a word writes about subtle things of how sometimes we mishear words,how we misinterpret and misunderstand them.

The art of seeing

Helen Keller asks, "How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note?" in her essay Three days to see
I wonder how I missed the tower on the end of a corner building. I have even wished to dine on the rooftop of that building. I could bet 100$ that this conical roof wasnt on the building.
Having walked for years, I have still missed glaring details of buildings.
This time I did notice that US Airways center building has brick wall frame around glass on the west side while a building to its south has it reverse on the south face. I mention this to remember the play of material with bricks and glass. I saw a brick building recently and thought it could not be done well in any other thing. That being said, there are some people who get bored of those things and ask architects anything but that. And thats how Frank Gehry gave metal buildings.
When I sketch, I do see more details.
A View from the Bridge

Diversity

In the evening, all of us, kids in the hostel sat in a line by the wall. Sisters, the nuns at the convent school distribute the snacks. We have no idea of what is going to be the catch of the day. This wont last long. The snacks have been collected (forced to give away) from the kids who brought them from home after vacation. This was necessary. There were other kids- Chenchus who probably didnt bring any and many others who brought less. Imagine the cauldron with all sweets and savory snacks from different households.

The corner store

In this short excerpt from an essay by Eudora Welty, few lines that sum up a store's fascination.

"It was up to you to remember what you came for, while your eye traveled from cans of sardines to tin whistles to ice-cream salt to harmonicas to fly-paper(over your head, batting around on a thread beneath the blades of the ceiling fan, stuck with its testimonial catch)."

As a kid, the store that I frequented had a lady who was very tall like a Greek sculpture. Later she had a baby too. Statue of Liberty.

Between ends and beginnings

The carrots in 'Chicken cashew salad' at Cheesecake factory. A big fan of Broccoli. Even I dont understand this. But I wasnt always like this. There was a time when I had to give up on rice. Is that possible? And before that I had to eat all raw vegetables. Siddha Samadhi Yoga. And that wasnt the only change. I had to move for college.
When I joined this program my parentd would have thought that it will do me good. A healthy student can face college better. The ending of the program just about coincided with the beginning of college. Such being the schedule, feeling weak from the lack of comfort food, I was not up to battling the anxiety of coping in a college where there would 424 students who have proved themselves to be better than me.

All in a day

Pittsburgh Steelers ABC: My First Alphabet Book (My First Alphabet Books (Michaelson Entertainment)) 

Last Monday I was upto many things.
Least of which was dropping a car key into the recycle dumpster before a license extension task.
Once there my eyes scanned at 'when driving at 65 miles per hour, to halt it takes a distance longer than a football field'.
This line is from Saturday Evening Post, January/February , 1975 included in Patterns Plus

A walk by a dried lake

It is a weekend of clouds. A relief in many months. A week ago, the dam burst. I should have expected the loss of water. There is water in some spots just a surface of it. There are small fish, dried and slaked in mud. A bicycle. Many crate skeletons and tires.
When I started the walk, I was torn between two choices - one of taking the routine walk which would bring back the routine of months ago and the other of going east. In the east direction, there has been some development- a mall. Long time ago, I couldnt take that path as there was no path. On the northern side too, new condominiums have come up, the lake and park have been built on that side too. I wasnt sure if the northern and southern side were connected. Between these two banks there is a disconnected bank. So we need two connections. To find out I have to walk ahead. I havent done that in a while. Exploring by walk.
First section SE. There are about 10 turkey vultures in air and on land. One seems to be bothering another. I can see their necks red. When they soar, the white of their wings. I wished to sit on the bank steps, in their line of sight but police cordons prevented it. As I kept walking I saw a great blue heron still with its right foot lifted at an angle and that can only mean one thing, it has found a prey. Sure enough, its bill sticks out of a water with a fish in it. I go as far as the path leads me to a 'no trespassing' sign. I trace the steps back and cross the bridge.
Second section NE. I have never been this side. As I walk ahead, there is a small dog with bark. The owner, dog and I are in a triangle. I freeze to let the distance between them reduce. There are a set of high chairs around a table. I could sit here another time with a book. I pass another bridge. Then come viewing areas of ponds with yellow water lilies and a strict instruction to stay on the path. I almost reach curry road. Time to turn around. kill deers. Sandpipers. Snowy egrets. Doves. Grackles. House Finches.
Once I reach the main bridge, I am in a familiar terrain. While crossing by the marina, I find a small silver fish partly hanging from a railing. In the front part only the eye ring remains like a snail. Its strange that the wind did not lodge it down. I think of Tisdale's essay of ' The sutra of maggits and blowflies' and find a sticky looking secretion by the side which would have been the adhesive. What led the bird leave its food in haste?
Next week I want to head west.
A kid looks at the countdown number of the traffic and says ' Run, we have only 3 min' to his parents.
Yesterday two kids walking on each side of a parent are running with their little feet, hands held, to make the light. A girl and a kid who just fell are jumping that they are close to mojo yogurt and that they can have icecream.

Rain

This year I waited for the rain
for three and a half weeks
The first two weekends there
were clouds with a faint smell of
shower
This weekend there were 3 drops.

Monday 10 drops.
Yesterday earth sent
a phantom wet smell.
Clouds and odors carry the
trust away

I drifted into the daily chores
Loud patter
In the balcony I reach my hands
out into the air
hands dripping, I wonder if
I should go for the drench

Today the medium rain
is a state where
I stay in it for a while
like I would in the sun

Forests

The trees in the canopy determine the trees in the understory and sometimes the trees in the understory can replace the predominant species.

The Life of The Forest.Jack McCormick.

Painting Light with its concept of shadow having a colour.

The green in Gustave Caillebotte's Boats and Shed on the Bank of the Seine reminded of the painting in yupha's Thai kitchen.


Jean Baptiste Camille Corot's Forest of Fontainebleau with the cow, made me wonder if it is possible to draw it as in the shades. Then I moved onto the rock fissure, then the trees. Smaller trees around merge into a huge one.

My new interest in trees has me reading Trees of North America and The Life of the forest

To date, I have identified Sycamore and fig trees from the guide. I felt the need for a guide after spotting a shrub in the South mountains on Holberts trail with its pod that I wanted to know more about.

Sometimes when I leaf through the book, one leaf does look very different from the other, even the pine cones. Just like how the kind of birds increase as we keep paying attention to them.

When I see the picture of a bird in a picture with text identifying an animal, I want to know of the bird too.

Laundry Drying of Gustave Caillebotte looks like smoke from a factory or the top of a factory.

Infrared reflectography shows all the underdrawings on a canvas.

Talk of the building

Conversations with Frank Gehry

I came across Frank Gehry as an architect in a movie on Louis Kahn.

Each building brings with it the chance of using a new material.In this book, looking at models of Weisman Art Museum in brown (may be wood), white and metal, I could see how each material lends a different look to the building. The wooden seeming one recalled adobe houses.

Lewis Library and its Finnish influence?

pg.94 Gehry left models(metal)outside for an entire year to see how different seasons affect the building.

About
Tempe Centre of Arts architecture and more.

Urban Decay

When cliff dwellers left
their homes
it wasnt a blight.

Grand Motions

The Great Railway Bazaar Train through Asia by Paul theroux

Books with maps have never disappointed me.

His encounters with some kind of people seem to be so skewed. He has a very good style of making any kind of conversations fit into the book. A town that I was in had its train station at one end. If it can be generalized then his travel is only through the edges of towns meeting certain kinds of people and those experiences wont be a good sample of the whole.

In a para, he sums up how trains in different countries are different with different amenities.

I wasnt prepared for his experiences in Japan.

Power and thereof

Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habits of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.

Alexis de Tocquille

Once in power, every effort will be done to not lose it. If possible even to gain more power. To gain new powers, new weaknesses have to be brought about somewhere. When competitive, the artifice is limited to one side of the table.

Crossing borders

The place to study, work, live - all away from home is foreign. The days leading to the departure- the crossing of the border.

Why I read

I saw a sentence with 'subvert' in it. It was the last sentence in a para.

That is a word I cant come up with in writing. It scares me. Still I read.

Trepan, Palacles in 'The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies'