25 most recent entries:
Morning Music - "Ya Hussein!" Edition (Nov 05 2008 16:03 GMT)
Karajan directing Movement 4 of Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" - perfect music for a "ya Hussein!" morning.
Halloween Haikus (Nov 02 2008 18:03 GMT)
(1) The difference between solitude And loneliness - a maple in fall Light, and a maple in snowy shade. (2) The frayed yellow Virgin's cord from Brazil finally broke today. How forlorn is her sparrow wrist. (3) For revelers on the train, Isn't tomorrow too another Mask to wear? (4) I would be lying to you, love, If I didn't confess my vampire Blood quickened for her too.
Autumn Unheld (Oct 13 2008 13:41 GMT)
He opens a page, a vein of wood, and writes in royal blue, of the blues, distracted by the fires heaped on sidewalks. Every tree is an omen, a burning bush, and every line written under their undressing shadows, a journey back to sunlit rooms in which Adrienne's hair veined the white snows of beds, across the splayed cities of a continent. He should be fleeing such devastation, and the winters that trot at its heels. Yet he keeps looking back, again and again, thinking he can hold on to autumn's crimson in its passing, forgetting his fates are those of Orpheus's lot or Lot's wife.
Things He Carries (Sep 28 2008 15:17 GMT)
"“Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous to the other passengers?”At this Shahid clapped a hand to his chest and cried: “
Friday Night Working Man Music (Sep 27 2008 00:19 GMT)
Before Autumn (Sep 20 2008 16:55 GMT)
In a field speckled with the last of the cone flowers, and grass Bending to rust, I gaze at This city's unchanging steel and Its caged ambition - and before its Doorstep the ever mutable sea. It is these borderlands I inhabit - Serving at Mammon's temple and Stealing into Mnemosyne's vestibule, As I wait for the winter's breath To unloosen me from my green Fever, and make me as naked As the aquamarine nestled against
Mongrel Loves (Sep 16 2008 19:30 GMT)
Splash into one another as their pails Rattle and shake in my bone-house. Sometimes memory takes me to distant Adrienne, with her taste for grandeur, And sometimes to Radhika, who stands Close by, whispering something tender, Even though sometimes I get confused, And wonder who is who, and what Color is whose banner. Neither are, And are, because these word fragments Shaped into markers of longing for each Abound. But sometimes when I open My ancient notebooks to read A foreign tongue with a foreign tongue (It changes as the mouths it kisses change) - From their shape they appear like - Few words, lot of empty space at the margins - Not very different from those nights When trees try to invade with their trashing Shadows, and fingers trace a vanished shape, Marginal, her(I can't give her a name) Throat in full laughter perhaps - the poem That had no memoirst at hand to record.
Beauty Of Fragments (Sep 14 2008 03:58 GMT)
If home is found on both sides of the globe, Home is of course here - and always a missed land. ~ Agha Shahid Ali You will not be the first engineer to get a green card, Says a stranger to him, drinking beer and thinking of dactyls gone missing. Do you intend to return? The economy over there is booming. Tell me then why I, in memory, return only to the chor bazaars?
Rainy Evening Music - Sigur Ros (Sep 12 2008 22:23 GMT)
The Icelandic gang is back with a lovely new album. I have been listening to it all day, and I think you should too. The opening single "Gobbledigook" is one hell of a song - it makes me want to run out and jump in rain puddles instead of doing these interminable spreadsheets! Click on the widget below to listen to the album whole: .
Salivation & Etc (Aug 29 2008 14:28 GMT)
[1] Ever since I encountered pictures of this homey public library, I want to go to Amsterdam to pay a visit. Very beautiful. I wouldn't mind doing what the folks in the middle of this photo are doing either, or taking a nap over here after an afternoon of reading! Apart from Amsterdam library visits, I also want to go to Istanbul. Pamuk's book of the same title seemed to have infected me with a huzun for that city of domes, spires, and waters.
PS. Write Me A Story! (Jul 29 2008 01:55 GMT)
This sentence like a neolithic arrow Molted with rust, and in a hand He had forgotten, surfaces from A book of poems he had taken Down at random to read on A Sunday afternoon in the summer When the vanishings of memory began. Outside the dolor of heat, heavy Under a fog of smoke - in the other country heat was dry like her laughter, and trees broadcast their urgent passions Using flags of maroon. How close are Unrelated words - maroon and marooned? Everything made sense once -in the way his mouth skated across her calvicle, and the way her singing pierced his hands of dripping ice. So on walking into a wood paneled room with an attached garden - meant for the idle contemplation of a scholar mandarin - Years after they had spent a summer afternoon in that museum, his head whiplashes as a girl enters What story could have been told By those who came from them Had they stayed within the narrative They each told to themselves first?
Friday Evening Music - Rachid Taha & Barra Barra (Jul 25 2008 22:12 GMT)
...first heard on the soundtrack of "Black Hawk Down"...working beyond 6.00 pm, and enjoying what is in reality a bleak song...
Ghazal - Momin Khan Momin (Jul 19 2008 17:24 GMT)
The harmony that was in you, and was in me, perhaps you remember it, or not That to which we were to be faithful, perhaps you remember it, or not Those overtures in general, those hands of kindness over mine, Everything I remember, a little - perhaps you remember too, or not Once there was desire in you and me, just as once there was a road between us Once we were completely lost in each other - perhaps you remember this, or not? Translated, approximately, from the Urdu Watch Nayyara Noor's searing performance of this famous ghazal
A Fragment In Response (Jul 12 2008 21:03 GMT)
"......No longer the core of each other’s waking (or sleeping) hours." ~ from here ... and so the days are given to a travelogue of insignificances - that they were born, that they lived in that house once, loved and were on occasion loved back - none of this a cause for a tragedy - barely a squeak under the great whirling wheel of time (or as revolutionaries would have it, Historical Imperative) - yet how would it be, if the arts of memory were denied to them?
Lunch Time Notes (Jun 26 2008 17:30 GMT)
These past few lovely summer days, Africa on my mind: first there was Salif Keita's dazzle in a Brooklyn dusk, and last evening, Orchestra Baobab's Senegalese spin on Cuban rumba, by the shores of Hudson River. And to complement such musical feasting, two writers, previously one known and one not, inflaming an old scabby hunger (grown passive with time etc) for literature: this past week witnessed consumption of two novels from the roof of the world, Halldór Laxness's "The Fish Can Sing" (from Icelandic) and Knut Hamsun's brilliant "Growth of the Soil" (from Norwegian)
Down In The Grass (Jun 21 2008 19:28 GMT)
Cottonwoods send white gowned emissaries to the grass - where I try To overhear the word that passes Between the nodding stalks of berries And the wind - now embroidered by The flight of skylarks, and dragonflies
Dusk Took Me In... (Jun 21 2008 19:26 GMT)
As I let go of Adrienne's hand On that foreign veranda - As foreign as she claimed I was to her, and as foreign As that once native ground Had become. So a foreign Dusk took me in, by the hand. And in that hand left a hunk Of dark bread. I gnaw and Gnaw on it, with a hunger (which doesn't seem to abate) For that evening I last tasted Stardust from Adrienne's mouth - Before dusk took me in, Before darkness fell.
Morning Music... (Jun 21 2008 16:11 GMT)
on repeat... Salif Keita's "Tomorrow"
Trompe-l'oeils (Jun 14 2008 16:25 GMT)
The schooner of separation, with its cargo of words is nearly at vanishing point. Waves break over driftwood beached here at my moonlit feet. No stars, not even the hiss of nebulae falling away from our planet - with its distant cities, you in one, I in another - in the whitewashed sky. All those June days of green heat & evenings we spent watching thunderstorms to the Great American Songbook- Were those deeps we reached, Adrienne, trompe-l'oeils rather than moments of a lived summer, I wonder?
Excerpts From A Newspaper Article (Jun 12 2008 22:45 GMT)
[1] "The basis for the new accusations, some of which were classified, was not disclosed at the hearing. Tribunal members acknowledged they were just as confused as the detainees about the origin of some of the allegations. "At this point, we don't know why you are being accused of being a member of the XXX Group," one military officer, whose name was redacted from the tribunal transcript, told B. "Do you have any idea why you are being connected with this group?" "I don't know," B replied.
Hijr (Jun 10 2008 18:28 GMT)
[1] His mind - a bone-lantern, a skull hammered into a stone-spine, above a hearth that is always stone cold - dreams of Adrienne's red tresses. It was caressed once by them - A while back - softly like smoke billowing from memories burning now, in his mind. [2] Adrienne lies in a stanza - room in Italian - she is still, sleeping. He is outside of her, a movable language written and lost when Wind sifts shadows of tree leaves Over her naked body - which is now being loved by another. The stranger's arms are dipping into the river that is Adrienne's waist.
To the Gods of Summer - Debora Greger (May 31 2008 21:17 GMT)
Dandelion, isn't it time? Dark was the British winter, and dank, and what passed for spring just more of the same. When will you show your face around here again? Mayfly, who live for just a day, when will you take the time to drag your larger, longer shadow down from the sundial? May we be granted the sight, if not of sun, then of a yellow so luminous we gray souls look and then look away:
Night Music - Illu (May 30 2008 03:19 GMT)
As a long lost friend was on my mind this evening, and we both loved the Great Ilaiyaraaja's (Illu for us) music passionately, I was searching for the Telugu version of this song but couldn't find it - so the Tamil version should do.
Herr. Kafka Meet Herr. BLU (May 29 2008 17:49 GMT)
h/t Lost At E -Minor
Above The Gravel Pit (May 27 2008 16:26 GMT)
"It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said." ~ Michael Ondaatje in "Divisadero" Remember that whorled sky, Adrienne? Its blue, I said, matched your eyes. We were indoors.
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