Monday, August 31, 2020

T. S. ELIOT
"Little Giddings" (Part II)
____________________

Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

There are flood and drought
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: "What! are you here?"
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other--
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: "The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember."
And he: "I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer."
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.

Sunday, August 30, 2020

WILLA CATHER
My Antonia
____________________

The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said, "This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth." It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.

Saturday, August 29, 2020

SAMUEL BECKETT
Molloy
______________________

Perhaps I had invented him, I mean found him ready made in my head. There is no doubt one sometimes meets with strangers who are not entire strangers, through their having played a part in certain cerebral reels.

Friday, August 28, 2020

JOHN KEATS
“To Sleep”
____________________

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.

Thursday, August 27, 2020

JORGE LUIS BORGES
“Ars Poetica”
____________________

To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind’s days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,

To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the afternoons a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours.

They tell how Ulysses, glutted with wonders,
Wept with love to descry his Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of wonders.

It is also like an endless river
That passes and remains, a mirror for one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And another, like an endless river.


Harold Moreland translation

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

MASTER DŌGEN
____________________

Life and death are nothing but the mind. Years, months, days, and hours are nothing but the mind. Dreams, illusions, and mirages are nothing but the mind. The bubbles of water and the flames of fire are nothing but the mind. The flowers of the spring and the moon of the autumn are nothing but the mind. Confusions and dangers are nothing but the mind.

CURRY & KIMCHI
Flavor Secrets for Creating 70 Asian-Inspired Recipes at Home

Unmi Abkin & Roger Taylor
DakhaBrakha
NA DOBRANICH

ДахаБраха
На Добраніч

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

ETGAR KERET
The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God
____________________

His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That’s when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn’t even an angel, just a liar with wings.

Monday, August 24, 2020

SPECIAL AGENT DALE COOPER
_____________________

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good hot black coffee.

Sunday, August 23, 2020

SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Einstein Intersection
____________________

“What are you doing here?” I asked her at last.

“Probably the same thing you are.”

“What’s that?”

She looked serious. “Why don’t you tell me?”

I went back to my knife. “Sharpening my machete.”

“I’m sharpening my mind,” she said. “There is something to be done that will require an edge on both.”

Saturday, August 22, 2020

EDMUND WHITE
A Boy’s Own Story
____________________

For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve–then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging.
DakhaBrakha
ALEMBARI

  

ZŮSTANE TO MEZI NÁMI 

IT WILL STAY BETWEEN US

Miroslav Šindelka
Poland, 2003

Friday, August 21, 2020

STEPHEN HAWKING
____________________

My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is, and why it exists at all.

Thursday, August 20, 2020

SAMUEL R. DELANY
Triton
____________________

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep. 

Wednesday, August 19, 2020


DIRTY VEGAN - ANOTHER BITE
Brand-New Rocking Vegan Recipes

Matt Pritchard
RYŌKAN
__________________

If you speak delusions, everything becomes a delusion; If you speak the truth, everything becomes the truth. Outside the truth there is no delusion, but outside delusion there is no special truth. Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places? Look for delusion and truth in the bottom of your own hearts.

SIGNS

M. Night Shyamalan
USA, 2002

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

ABUL ʿALA AL-MAʿARRI
____________________

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: 

Those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.

WALK THE LINE

James Mangold
USA 2005

Monday, August 17, 2020

SAMUEL BECKETT
Waiting for Godot
____________________

He speaks to me again! If this goes on much longer we’ll soon be old friends.

Saturday, August 15, 2020

SAMUEL BECKETT
Molloy
____________________

Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.

Friday, August 14, 2020

DEBORAH KERR
____________________

If you have freckles, you might as well relax and enjoy them. There’s nothing you can do about them.

Thursday, August 13, 2020

HART CRANE
“To Brooklyn Bridge”
____________________

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day …

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn …
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon … Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,—

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year …

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

JOHN FOWLES
The Magus
____________________

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all women - and absurd.

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.
DakhaBrakha
NA MEZHI

 

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

PHILIP LARKIN
“Sad Steps”
____________________

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky
There’s something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
High and preposterous and separate --
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Monday, August 10, 2020

HỒ XUÂN HƯƠNG TRADITION
[”My husband is useless”]
____________________

My husband is useless, Sisters. He gambles
All day long, goes berserk
When I complain. It is embarrassing
Even to talk about it. To settle his debts,
I’ll have to sell four or five baskets
Of threshed rice, kilos of cotton.
We’ll eat less. This bitter berry
I’ll suck without complaints, lest everyone laughs.
Confucian-trained, yet I live with a fool.
A dragon in a pool of mud.
A smart wife with a stupid husband.

Sunday, August 9, 2020


DakhaBrakha in Dnipro, Free Ukraine - Dec 12, 2010

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

 

W. S. MERWIN
“For a Coming Extinction”
____________________

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And foreordaining as stars
Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

Saturday, August 8, 2020

LI BAI
“Alone and Drinking Under the Moon”
____________________

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.

WAR DOGS

Todd Phillips
USA, 2016

Friday, August 7, 2020

NICK CAVE
“God Is In The House”
____________________

We’ve laid the cables and the wires
We’ve split the wood and stoked
the fires
We’ve lit our town so there is no
Place for crime to hide
Our little church is painted white
And in the safety of the night
We all go quiet as a mouse
For the word is out
God is in the house
No cause for worry now
God is in the house

Moral sneaks in the White House
Computer geeks in the school house
Drug freaks in the crack house
We don’t have that stuff here
We have a tiny little Force
But we need them of course
For the kittens in the trees
And at night we are on our knees
As quiet as a mouse
For God is in the house
And no one’s left in doubt
God is in the house

Homos roaming the streets in packs
Queer bashers with tyre-jacks
Lesbian counter-attacks
That stuff is for the big cities
Our town is very pretty
We have a pretty little square
We have a woman for a mayor
Our policy is firm but fair
Now that God is in the house
Any day now He’ll come out
God is in the house

Well-meaning little therapists
Goose-stepping twelve-stepping Tetotalitarianists
The tipsy, the reeling and the drop down pissed
We got no time for that stuff here
Zero crime and no fear
We’ve bred all our kittens white
So you can see them in the night
And at night we’re on our knees
As quiet as a mouse
Since the word got out
From the North down to the South
For no-one’s left in doubt
There’s no fear about
If we all hold hands and very quietly shout
Hallelujah
Oh I wish He would come out
God is in the house

Thursday, August 6, 2020


DIRTY VEGAN
Proper Banging Vegan Food

Matt Pritchard
THOMAS PYNCHON
Gravity’s Rainbow
____________________

There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made — at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

SUSAN SONTAG
“Letter to Borges”

On the 10th anniversary of the death of Jorge Luis Borges, the late Susan Sontag revisited her admiration for his work and the enormity of his cultural legacy in a short and beautiful essay titled “Letter to Borges,” penned on June 13, 1996, included in her 2001 collection WHERE THE STRESS FALLS: ESSAYS.
____________________

You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit.

You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.

The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer — delicately you added: all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness — and of the book.

Dear Borges, please understand that it gives me no satisfaction to complain. But to whom could such complaints about the fate of books— of reading itself— be better addressed than to you? (Borges, it’s ten years!) All I mean to say is that we miss you. I miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

JIM CARROLL
“Prell"
____________________

Day changes from cannon to morning glory
her body dances death dances in the prell light
beads strung out all through Japan’s public parks, my head,
light green eyes of the birds that break branches to build homes there.
she tore the page, “Varieties of Emeralds”
from little sister’s picture encyclopedia.
I watched this all with a spike in my vein from a top floor window
I felt the blood pass from my arm into the glass tube above it…..
then it was rainy bonsai everywhere for me
and black masses across my brain like planets on solar maps
paper secrets I used to believe lined the open closet shelves
her body split and floated into the air forests like astral monkeys.
It’s there, the air the body the soft green day:
your life cutting through the light noise of New York City’s traffic dawn.

Monday, August 3, 2020

ALBERT CAMUS
The Fall
____________________

It was not a matter, mind you, of the certainty I had of being more intelligent than everyone else. Besides, such certainty is of no consequence because so many imbeciles share it.

Gustav Klimt
Pregnant Woman and Man, 1903

Sunday, August 2, 2020

RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR

Chris Gorak
USA, 2006
HALLDÓR LAXNESS
World Light
______________________

He wept only as children weep when they suffer injustice at the hands of those stronger than themselves. It is the most bitter weeping in the world. That was what happened to his [only] book; it was taken from him and burned. And he was left standing naked and without a book on the first day of summer.
ДахаБраха
Шлях 
-
DakhaBrakha
THE PATH
 

Saturday, August 1, 2020

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
From Roman Poems
____________________

The fury of confession, at first,
then the fury of clarity:
It was from you, Death, that such hypocritical
obscure feeling was born! And now
let them accuse me of every passion,
let them bad-mouth me, let them say I’m deformed,
impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer.
You isolate me, you give me the certainty of life,
I’m on the stake. I play the card of fire
and I win this little, immense goodness of mine.
I can do it, for I have suffered you too much!

I return to you as an émigré returns
to his own country and rediscovers it:
I made a fortune (in the intellect)
and I’m happy, as I once was,
destitute of any norm,
a black rage of poetry in my breast.
A crazy old-age youth.
Once your joy was confused with terror,
it’s true, and now almost with other joy,
livid and arid, my passion deluded.
Now you really frighten me,
for you are truly close to me,
part of my angry state, of obscure hunger,

of the anxiety almost of a new being
.