Saturday, November 30, 2019



BETH GYLYS
"The Trouble with Love Poems About Men"

They're not of curves and shadows made.
They don't wear skirts to swoop and tease
the eye, nor toss their hair, nor sway.
So arduous to package men to please:
a slant of hip, or buttocks tucked in faded
jeans—they lack aesthetic flair. A spray

of curls might fan their brows, or bellies bloom
above their belts. To paint men in the best
of light, requires certain skill. The groom
looks better if he's built. He'll fill
his tux with sculpted flesh. His chest
will taper to the cummerbund. Still,

what work to capture men's appeal!
A rise between the legs will also shade
and shape their usual lines. Alas, revealed,
the bulge is but a stick. We live dismayed.
It's difficult to bring men warm regard.
We try. Their love is always hard.

Friday, November 29, 2019






CHARLOTTE SMITH
"Reflections on Some Drawings of Plants"

I can in groups these mimic flowers compose,
  These bells and golden eyes, embathed in dew;
Catch the soft blush that warms the early Rose,
  Or the pale Iris cloud with veins of blue;
Copy the scallop’d leaves, and downy stems,
  And bid the pencil’s varied shades arrest
Spring’s humid buds, and Summer’s musky gems:
  But, save the portrait on my bleeding breast,
I have no semblance of that form adored,
  That form, expressive of a soul divine,
  So early blighted, and while life is mine,
With fond regret, and ceaseless grief deplored—
  That grief, my angel! with too faithful art
  Enshrines thy image in thy Mother’s heart.

Thursday, November 28, 2019


EARTHA KITT
"Los Angelitos Negros / Little Black Angels"
ERICH FROM from The Art of Loving

Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.


Wednesday, November 27, 2019

ABRAHAM VERGHESE
Cutting For Stone

To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.



Getcha little somethin' that ya can't get at home.

- Tom Waits
RYŌKAN

have you forgotten me
or lost the path here?
i wait for you
all day, every day
but you do not appear.
More or less:

I've done better but this is a good start.
RON PADGET

When Jesus found himself
nailed to the cross,
crushed with despair,
crying out,
"Why has thou forsaken me?"
he enacted the story
of every person who suddenly realizes
not that he or she has been forsaken
but that there was never
a forsaker,
for the idea of immortality
that is a birthright of every human being
gradually vanishes
until it is gone
and we cry out.

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

LUMINOUS MELODIES
Essential Dohas of Indian Mahāmudrā

Karl Brunnhölzl
Wisdom, 2019
PHILIP LARKIN
”The Old Fools”

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this ? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning ? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September ?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming

Watching light move ? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange:
Why aren’t they screaming ?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines-
How can they ignore it ?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,

Setting down a Iamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’ s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’ s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet.
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end ? Not at night?

Not when the strangers come ? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.


PENTHESILEA
Pascal Dusapin 

Franck Ollu

Natascha Petrinsky, Marisol Montalvo, Georg Nigl, Werner van Mechelen, Orchestre Symphonique, Choers de la Montaigne

Monday, November 25, 2019

ZELDA FITZGERALD“Eulogy on the Flapper”

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.



HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
“The Little Mermaid”


She laughed and danced with the thought of death in her heart.

Sunday, November 24, 2019


GRENSELAND
-
BORDERLINER


Creator:
Megan Gallagher

Directors:
Bård Fjulsrud, Gunnar Vikene, Rune Denstad Langlo

Norway, 2017
ROBERT WARSHOW

The sense of tragedy is a luxury of aristocratic societies.

Saturday, November 23, 2019


TABULA RASA

Creators:
Veerle Baetens, Malin-Sarah Gozin, Christophe Dirickx

Directors:
Kaat Beels, Jonas Govaerts

Belgium, 2017
JORGE LUIS BORGES

The image that I shall leave when I’m dead — we’ve already said that this is part of a poet’s works — and maybe the most important — I don’t know exactly what it will be, I don’t know if I’ll be viewed with indulgence, with indifference, or with hostility. Of course, that’s of little importance to me now; what does matter to me is not what I’ve written but what I am writing and what I’m going to write. And I think this is how every writer feels. Alfonso Reyes said that one published what he had written in order to avoid spending his life correcting it: one publishes a book in order to leave it behind, one publishes a book in order to forget it.
THE WICKER MAN

Robin Hardy,
UK, 1973

DakhaBrakha from Free Ukraine

PORTA World Music Festival, Latvia
June 11, 2015

NINA GARENETSKA
Vokals, cello, bass drum

MARKO HALANEVYCH
Vokals, darbuka, tabla, didjeridoo, accordion, trombone

IRYNA KOVALENKO
Vokals, djembe, bass drums, accordion, percussion, bugay, zgaleyka, piano

OLENA TSYBULSKA
Vokals, bass drums, percussion, garmoshka

Friday, November 22, 2019

JOHN KEATS
“To Autumn”

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948)


Thursday, November 21, 2019


POST TENEBRAS LUX

Carlos Reygadas
Mexico, 2012

BASHŌ

Autumn moonlight -
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.



Wednesday, November 20, 2019

LIQUID SKY

Slava Tsukerman
US, 1982


HAROLD PINTER
The Hothouse

I don’t care whether it’s true or not. I don’t like to have a thing repeated and repeated and repeated! Anyone would think I was slow on the uptake. The snow has turned to slush. I heard it. I understand it. That’s enough.

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

ISHAMEL BEAH

I learned that you are not free until you stop others from making you feel worthless. Because if you do not, you will eventually accept that you are worthless.

Monday, November 18, 2019



FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.


Sunday, November 17, 2019

ANNE SEXTON - “The Fury of Cocks”

There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
animal sad,
and only the night before
there they were
playing the banjo.
Once more the day’s light comes
with its immense sun,
its mother trucks,
its engines of amputation.
Whereas last night
the cock knew its way home,
as stiff as a hammer,
battering in with all
its awful power.
That theater.
Today it is tender,
a small bird,
as soft as a baby’s hand.
She is the house.
He is the steeple.
When they fuck they are God.
When they break away they are God.
When they snore they are God.
In the morning they butter the toast.
They don’t say much.
They are still God.
All the cocks of the world are God,
blooming, blooming, blooming
into the sweet blood of woman.

大象席地而坐
-
AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL


Hu Bo
China, 2018

Saturday, November 16, 2019


WE ARE THE WAVE

Creators:
Jan Berger, Dennis Gansel, Peter Thorwarth

Directors:
Anca Miruna Lazarescu
Mark Monheim

Germany, 2019
MARGARET ATWOOD - "You Fit Into Me"

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye


Friday, November 15, 2019


RAILWAY ENGINEER, IRAN

Othmar Pferschy, mid-1950s
RABIOSO SOL, RABIOSO CIELO
(English title: RAGING SUN, RAGING SKY)

Julián Hernández
Mexico, 2009

Almost without exception, I simply post what I've watched with no commentary. This time I have to.

This film is fucking awesome and although I know most people would walk out or shut it off within the first half hour, I can't recommend it more strongly.

Currently playing on The Criterion Channel.
ANNE CARSON - "My Religion"

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

When we see
how simple it would have been
we will thrash ourselves.

I had a vision
of all the people in the world
who are searching for God

massed in a room
on one side
of a partition

that looks
from the other side
(God’s side)

transparent
but we are blind.
Our gestures are blind.

Our blind gestures continue
for some time until finally
from somewhere

on the other side of the partition there we are
looking back at them.
It is far too late.

We see how brokenly
how warily
how ill

our blind gestures
parodied
what God really wanted

(some simple thing)
The thought of it
(this simple thing)

is like a creature
let loose in a room
and battering

to get out.
It batters my soul
with its rifle butt.


Thursday, November 14, 2019

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.


Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Monday, November 11, 2019

Currently Reading
____________________

BARON WENCKHEIM'S HOMECOMING

László Krasznahorkai
CORMAC McCARTHY from The Road

In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell.