waiting to cross

and it's only the last week of may.

2008-05-29T16:15:00.003-04:00

I'm home again. What do I do with myself now?

I haven't even read any poetry lately. I read House of Sand and Fog this past weekend and it was the saddest book I've read in awhile. It also taught me an interesting handful of Persian vocabulary my father never taught me. Still, I don't know if I liked it very much. Something unsettling with these books about Iranian ex-pats. Especially when they're not written by Iranian ex-pats.

Houston has a bad transportation system. It's been my project since the summer after freshman year of college to figure out how it works. I think I will finally start this Saturday.

an update II

2008-05-06T02:41:00.005-04:00

The pear tree that last year
was heavy laden this year
bears little fruit. Was
it that wet spring we had?
All the pear tree leaves
go shimmer, all at once. The
August sun blasts down
into the coolness from the
ocean. The New York Times
is on strike. My daily
fare! I'll starve! Not
quite. On my sill, balls
of twine wrapped up in
cellophane glitter. The
brown, the white, and one
I think you'd call écru.
The sunlight falls partly
in a cup: it has a blue
transfer of two boys, a
dog and a duck and says,
"Come Away Pompey." I
like that cup, half
full of sunlight. Today
you could take up the
tattered shadows off
the grass. Roll them
and stow them. And collect
the shimmerings in a
cup, like the coffee
here at my right hand.

- "Shimmer," James Schuyler

Do I really lack that much grace? Sometimes I wonder. I have a fear of doing ungraceful things, and I must do three or four of them a day.

an update

2008-03-25T00:43:00.005-04:00

Sometimes when I read back on these posts I feel like such a ridiculous idealist. Blogs are things that can make you feel very self-conscious, I guess. How embarrassing.

What kind of dorky high schooler thinks about naming their kids after poets and opera heroines?

Until a few days ago I was in Houston, Texas again. On a particular day I went to a birthday party in which some very small cousins of mine(once removed) beat down some piñatas while wearing princess dresses. A few days later I went prom dress shopping with my sister -- this lasted over the course of the entire week. There were really few differences between the birthday dresses and my sister's choices (including size and non-relative length).

Also, Spanish piñata chants can sound very disturbing when sung by a chorus of people under the age of 10. The children do not sing in tune together. That dissonant top-of-a-bunch-of-small-lungs shout in conjunction with that hard thrashing noise made against some poor papier mache animal getting beaten to death just sounds violent. This all happened at the start of Holy Week.

Somehow I am willing to bet that William Faulkner reads really damn well in Spanish. El sonido y la furia.

dear gidon kremer

2008-03-05T00:58:00.005-05:00

This is just to say that every time I listen to your performance of the final movement of the Brahms violin concerto, it makes me feel quite invincible.

(Although I have to say -- and this is totally not your fault -- about two months later, I am still incredibly perturbed by the way the movement was used in the soundtrack of There Will Be Blood, to the point where I don't know if I can ever listen to this piece in quite the same way again.)

Best,

M.P.

para un nuevo tiempo

2008-02-19T00:57:00.012-05:00

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes! and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
- Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"

Equivocar el camino
es llegar a la nieve
y llegar a la nieve
es pacer durante varios siglos las hierbas de los cementerios.

Equivocar el camino
es llegar a la mujer,
la mujer que no teme la luz,
la mujer que mata dos gallos en un segundo,
la luz que no teme a los gallos
y los gallos que no saben cantar sobre la nieve.

Pero si la nieve se equivoca de corazón
puede llegar el viento Austro
y como el aire no hace caso de los gemidos
tendremos que pacer otra vez las hierbas de los cementerios.

Yo vi dos dolorosas espigas de cera
que enterraban un paisaje de volcanes
y vi dos niños locos que empujaban llorando las pupilas de un asesino.

Pero el dos no ha sido nunca un número
porque es una angustia y su sombra,
porque es la guitarra donde el amor se desespera,
porque es la demostración de otro infinito que no es suyo
y es las murallas del muerto
y el castigo de la nueva resurrección sin finales.

Los muertos odian el número dos,
pero el número dos adormece a las mujeres
y como la mujer teme la luz
la luz tiembla delante de los gallos
y los gallos solo saben volar sobre la nieve
tendremos que pacer sin descanso las hierbas de los cementerios.

- Pequeño Poema Infinito, Gabriel García Lorca
New York, 10 de enero de 1930

Over the past few days I've had some wonderful conversation with Mark Statman, who along with Pablo Medina has created a beautiful, very well-done translation of Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York, which Edward Hirsch has called "a Poet in New York for our time." It's impossible for a translation to ever be as good as the original, but for the English reader this it's as good as it gets -- and it's well-deserved, for a poet's words in which so many (including Allen Ginsberg) found resonance.

I first read his poetry when I was thirteen years old, perhaps a bit young to understand any of his intentions in any language. Reading a Lorca poem is almost like reading heiroglyphics; you're constantly looking for some way to crack his code, his duende and his moons and his blood and his blue and grey-to-black color schemes. The catch with this poet -- as with any poet -- is to understand him in his own jargon.

There's background story to this work, of course. Lorca composed Poet in New York during the several months he spent in New York as a student. It is important to know, while reading this work, that Lorca lived in Manhattan right at the time of the stock market collapse -- he happened to be walking on Wall Street on Black Tuesday, and witnessed six businessmen jumped out their windows. Over several months he responded to his feelings of appalledness, depression, and turmoil through poetry. He ended up with Poeta en Nueva York, which reads in some ways like an epic -- a map, if you will, of his emotional response to the things he experienced. After the World Trade Center tragedy, the translators realized upon re-reading the work that it responded to so much of the emotion and confusion that New Yorkers were experiencing in 2001. As poets themselves, they felt compelled enough to create a new translation that would transmit those sentiments as the author meant for them to be felt.

Eight years later, I find myself reading Poet in New York for the first time, and I'm beginning to see him from a different angle. "Lorca doesn't write in Spanish," Mark said to me, more than once, during our conversations. "Lorca writes in Lorca." I suppose this is how he translates too.

appellations

2008-02-16T02:49:00.007-05:00

Sometimes I think about my name and how strange it is that it is uncommon enough in America for people to still question its pronunciation, but common enough to merit 500+ search results on Facebook. It is strange to see my name over and over again on the internet without it being me listed. Somewhere in London lives a young woman who has stolen my identity -- or perhaps I have stolen hers, last name and all -- and once awhile ago I was messaged by a friend of hers who had mistakenly contacted me. She quickly apologized and explained that, believe it or not, there lives another girl in the world with my name. I felt so naked, almost othered in a strange way. Who is this Maryam, is she a nice person, does she like books and Messiaen like me or does she like better things, what does she do? Does she know better what to do with herself than I? Wait! What if someone Googles us? Won't that be confusing? Case in point: I am not a unique snowflake, alas.

When I was younger I always thought that hypothetically someday I would name my daughters after opera heroines that I knew of at the time like Aida or Isolde or Pamina, and my sons after immortalized poets -- Federico, Hafez, Guillaume (although at the time I think I had very little idea of what Apollinaire's poems were like). They are all lovely names but I worry that if I actually followed through with that I would have a very Europeanesquely-named group of children, save Hafez of course. My roommate tells me that in Indian culture sometimes children, post-birth, are nameless for awhile, until the perfect name arises. Names are very sensitive things. My mother tells me I was almost a Cynthia, and I am very glad I am not.

By bad luck today I lost, among other things, a wonderful 90-minute interview. This has never happened to me before; I just spent two and a half hours feeling like a horrible journalist. I had such a pleasant afternoon in Park Slope, I don't know what happened. But Park Slope is lovely. I dislike these paradoxical sort of days because they are so unsettling. It is most unfortunate to end a fairly happy day with disappointment. If you poured yourself (by accident) a cup of rotten milk into your bowl of cereal in the evening before bedtime, it would be much more unsettling than if the same thing happened in the morning.

Perhaps Other Maryam has better thoughts.

si se puede

2008-02-06T22:05:00.000-05:00

From Denver, last Thursday night:

"We're the party of a man who overcame his own disability; who told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself; and who faced down fascism and liberated a continent from tyranny.

"We're the party of Jackson, who took back the White House for the people of this country.

"And we're the party of Jefferson, who wrote the words that we are still trying to heed - that all of us are created equal - and who sent us West to blaze new trails, to make new discoveries, and to realize the promise of our highest ideals.

"That is who we are. That is the Party that we need to be, and can be, if we cast off our doubts, and leave behind our fears, and choose the America that we know is possible. Because there is a moment in the life of every generation, if it is to make its mark on history, when its spirit has to come through, when it must choose the future over the past, when it must make its own change from the bottom up.
"This is our moment. This is our message - the same message we had when we were up, and when we were down. . ."

For a long time I had been a skeptic, but a few weeks ago, I finally bought in.

Why Obama? There are many reasons, I think, but the fact that he moves people enough to create something like this -- completely unsolicited -- is just amazing.

Still a long way to go, baby. . .

Also, For the first time in years -- and literally, years -- there will be a Texas primary that matters. And I get to vote in it. I never thought I would be so terribly excited over the idea of voting in my life.

just, don't leave --

2008-02-03T01:35:00.001-05:00

-- and true love waits in haunted attics

on quiet saturdays

2008-01-26T23:54:00.000-05:00

There is not a more ominous way to start the semester than to have automatic doors awkwardly close on you when you are on your way out of the library with a large armful of books. I was very flustered to have discovered this two days ago. Somehow I cannot avoid carrying a million things at once and when doors close on you it just makes you feel, well...

I had lunch in a tiny little diner near Lincoln Center today with a good friend of mine who is currently in the process of making big changes in his life. He is a wonderfully intelligent person, one of the few I can speak very openly with. In midst of this long wild discussion on time-space fabric and psychology and Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia and living in bubbles and moving on with things etcetera, somewhere in that progression I told him I was beginning to feel slightly old. I am turning 21, I said to him, and in about a week and a half, but all I want to do on my 21st birthday is sit on a couch somewhere and probably watch a lot of television, and I don't even own a TV.

People have a distinct way of laughing when you make a statement like that which they find remote amusement and empathy in. He gave me one of those slight laughs, and he knew that it was exactly what I was going to say. Somewhere later in that conversation I guess we both realized that we all come across days where we wish we could quit most people. It's a more human characteristic than I give it credit for, I suppose.

In the last two weeks I've been perpetually listening to the Barber violin concerto. Only a few days ago on Tuesday, while I was walking out of the violin shop where I usually go, I heard someone in a another room play the opening bars of the piece. I find it to be a very American piece; the melody has a distinct romanticism about it that makes it feel very American. Something very cinematic, or perhaps the feeling of coming across some gorgeous but unknown frontier. I've been so in love with this piece for months.

somewhere warmer

2008-01-16T02:36:00.001-05:00

Quite literally this is all cheap photography. My digital camera is a piece of junk, actually. Sometimes I have to hit it to make it work properly -- "percussion maintenance," if you will. You don't always like what you have, but you live with what you've got. Isn't that how it is usually? But anyway I'm no one terribly unfortunate. I still own a digital camera. And sometimes cheap pictures are still appreciable.

Anyway, my theory is, that's probably why people still spend so much on Polaroids.

Overall, when you think about it, theories like that are tangential and pretty silly.

Museum District, Houston, TX.
January 11, 2008.

severely disjunct thoughts from a previous hour

2008-01-16T01:12:00.000-05:00

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them.
Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

--- "Just Walking Around," John Ashbery

--------------------------------

"I don't know," she said.
"Of course you know. You're brilliant. Everyone says so."
"What else can they say? I do neurochemistry. No one knows what that is."
"Other scientists have some idea. And they say you're brilliant."
"We're all brilliant. Isn't that the understanding around here? You call me brilliant, I call you brilliant. It's a form of communal ego."
"No one calls me brilliant. They call me shrewd. They say I latched on to something big. I filled an opening no one knew existed."
"There are openings for brilliance too. It's my turn, that's all. Besides, I'm built funny and walk funny. If they couldn't call me brilliant, they would be forced to say cruel things about me. How awful for everyone."

--- from White Noise, Don DeLilo

-------------------------------------

In my room the radiator buzzes like an AM radio all the time and everything around here makes strange noises. Last night I had a series of terrible dreams where every time a peaceful or serene thought entered my mind it would turn itself into something hideous. I don't know if that was more of me dreaming or me trying to fall asleep. Half the time when I try put things into an explanation they only end up sounding like madness.

In my active moving life I avoid discussion of personal writing because it makes me extremely uncomfortable to explain the things I write. Why do the people who write things write them? Do they always enjoy it? I don't know if "enjoy" is the right word but I do know that writing things down can be a sort of catharsis for all the things you can't always explain so colloquially. When you play through a piece of music you hope that somehow your soul can make sense of it. Does this all fully make sense to you, whoever you are, perchance coming across this journal if you are indeed such a person, this figment of my life, you the person who are reading this? Does it matter, necessarily? Yes, no, this is garbage, non sequitur, oh maybe here and there yes, etc.

Last Tuesday they buried my grandfather in the city of Qom, early in the morning. There had been ruthless snow that week but that morning it did not come, until the very moment when the last words of the ceremony were uttered. At that instant the snow began to fall heavily. Last Tuesday marked the first day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar, the month in which Shiites observe the death of the Imam Hussain, grandson of the prophet Muhammad. The holiest of months after Ramadan, in Tehran the men dress in black and slather themselves in mud; in a mass chanted lamentation they hit their own faces and thighs until the their skin glows with the redness.

I had seen ahead of time, when it would occur. That is why, until my father told me how proud my babajun had been of me and how his face glowed when he heard his son mention my name in the hospital, I didn't cry at all. I am trying so hard to make myself deserve that, and yet endlessly I am convinced that I must be doing something wrong.

The only one who can give me any of these answers that I want so desperately is not going to hand them over so easily, if at all. My best guess is that you have to work for your answers as much as you have to work for anything else in life. And how wrong can I be about that?

things prolonged

2008-01-01T03:44:00.000-05:00

Today is January 1st 2008 and in the ICU wing of a hospital somewhere in Tehran, Iran on the other side of the world, my 91-year old grandfather is dying. He has been dying for about a month now, as we were reminded 10 minutes after midnight by a phone call from my aunt to my father. I think he is waiting for my uncle, the eldest of his boys, who has yet to make his flight from here to there.

A different story: my great grandfather on my mother's side passed away a few years ago, at 103 years old. Since 93 he had asked God to let him die, and God made him wait for 10 years. Either way by that point when you're in less-than-youthful condition I suppose you endure the wait, whether by will or by force. 91 is also a very long time. Anyway, I know nothing about what it's like. I'm only 20 and still very mobile.

I'm sitting on my bed right now, and supposedly I would be asleep by this point. On the contrary, I am very much awake, and behind me through my window I can hear the bass rhythms of parties going on in the houses behind us. I have never understood why the fireworks continue two and a half hours past midnight on this holiday. I hate fireworks, especially when they're set off in neighborhoods. Anyway, in this household New Year's eve is consistently un-celebrated, unless watching the ball drop on NBC with your parents on the couch half-asleep qualifies as celebration. I guess in a way I am just jealous of everyone else having a good time. Sometimes in a way I am really bothered by drunken shouting and salsa music.

inevitably, at least 4 of these may not happen

2007-12-31T20:07:00.000-05:00

More water, more vegetables. And take vitamins.

Get out of some of my debts. Do more lucrative things with my brain.

Develop social dance skills in hopes that it makes me less socially awkward. (Not that it will necessarily help? The key word, anyway, is hope.)

Be a better student. Be a bolder writer, be a bolder musician. Learn Bartok. Play more Beethoven. Read more biographies. Get to Germany, maybe stay for awhile. Speak German. Get a good accent.

Less clumsiness in high heels. Be a better-coordinated human being. Develop some classiness, avoid trashiness. Be a little less selfless and a little less selfish, both at the same time.

Get published somewhere outside of school magazines. Read more new writers and the things I've never read that people have been telling me to read for too long, i.e. Luc Sante, Ayn Rand, Victorian literature, so on. Finish all assigned readings.

Fearlessness, sans (too much) stupidity. Learn when to turn off my brain. Learn to sleep better. Think less about things lost, figure out how to get out of holes.

Either stay out of trouble by talking less, or come to terms with the fact that talking will often get one into trouble and there is nothing I can do about it sometimes. I always learn the hard way.

Among these, many other things. This includes figuring out what to do with myself sometime before the following year.

between major cities

2007-12-24T01:46:00.000-05:00

If you have ever found yourself within a 100-foot radius of a stranger with an extraordinarily resemblance to someone you know, it is a strange, haunting thing. While waiting in the Philadelphia bus line at Grand Authority on Saturday morning I noticed a man in one of the other bus lines who looked so much like a good friend of mine -- one who I recently sort of had a falling out with and hadn't really spoken to in a long time. I stood in my bus line for nearly half an hour, and the entire time I couldn't help but observe this man and all his features and mannerisms that reminded me so much of that friend; the haircut, the body frame and facial features, the way he answered his phone, his poise, the look of confusion on his face in response to whatever the person on the other line was saying. It was a resemblance was so striking that I wanted to shout my friend's name in that terminal filled with probably 500-some-odd people on the rare coincidence that it really was him, but of course such resemblances only go so far and I would have just been so embarrassed for no reason; it just couldn't have been, anyway.

The entire time in my half hour of being unable to not watch this person I felt guilty for many things, until our line was moved to another terminal. In any case certain guilts persist -- long story short, uncanniness is often awkward and very unsettling. I don't like it because it makes you feel so delusional.

Half the time on the bus ride to Philly I kept thinking about people I hadn't talked to for so long and, somewhat tangentially to all this I suppose, how breakups are very difficult processes that must force estrangement upon many people. Anyway, long trips by yourself often make you think a lot in a very segueing fashion, to the point where you dream those thoughts during those brief spells of sleep on those jolting bus/train/plane rides. They kind of fall into the same league as thoughts that happen when you're sitting on the subway looking at people's faces as they're reading their newspapers or listening to their iPods or thinking idly themselves; you don't quite know how to label that thinking but it reminds you that you're passing time and are on many levels a small part of something that is very large.

Philadelphia is one of my favorite cities to visit, for being so compact and old-school and a place where you can get almost anywhere you need to solely by walking. I was there for 4 1/2 hours on Saturday afternoon seeing friends before flying back home, and while there Ben and I stood in front of the Kimmel Center waved to Joel on the 25th floor of his apartment building a few blocks away. I wish I had taken a picture because it made me really happy.

That flight home was probably the worst flight I have ever taken back, and I had never wanted to get back to Houston so quickly in my last two and a half years of college. On a side note, Tex-Mex tastes so brilliant and delicious when you haven't had it in so long. I guess like this city too. I like it when Texans put lit reindeer and snowmen and fake wreaths and a preposterous amount of lights around their patio home garages when it's 54 degrees outside. I mean, you gotta do the best you can.

something of moderate coherence

2007-12-21T03:47:00.000-05:00

I realize what my problem is, and I think that my problem is that I think in fragments. I think that coherence is an art, especially when it comes to putting your thoughts together with words. It takes a very long time for me to get adjusted to words, or rather, get comfortable with the words that I gravitate to. Coherence, I've decided, is difficult sometimes. Often times. In academic writing, when you're struggling with coherence or are unsure of whether you have it or not, it's kind of a challenge.

I think this is the type of realization that comes from trying to write 40 pages of essays within a relatively short time span. Granted, it could have been much worse. Anyway, now that that thought is over with, today signified the end of my fifth semester at this fine institution. Ha! Who would have thought? Finished semesters make me want to sleep forever. I woke up on our lovely couch at approximately 11:30 pm this evening.

Another flaw of mine is my tendency to waste lots of time on Youtube. The week before finals week I consecutively watched several Swedish Chef episodes and, probably as a result of being overschooled in theory as of late, thought to myself that clips such as this one make such great cases for surrealist humor:

... it was after the spur of that thought that I realized it was time to get out of school and go home as quickly possible.

On the other hand, I am really looking forward to seeing Persepolis this holiday break. This preview of the French version is amazing -- not to mention, how amazing/hilarious is it that Marjane sings "Eye of the Tiger" with a French accent?

Indeed. It is getting quite late.

on missing

2007-12-03T03:20:00.000-05:00

I've got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death

in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe

chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow

At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes

I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine

although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you'd be proud of

the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle

what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies it

is difficult to think
of you without me in
the sentence you depress
me when you are alone

Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I'll not be cordial

there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
do you know how it is

when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go

- "Morning," Frank O'Hara

---------------------------------------

It is strange and somewhat lonely, I think, when you find yourself organizing the books on your shelf by the people that they remind you of.

It snowed today.

messiaen the dreamweaver

2007-11-20T22:44:00.000-05:00

“Vocalise, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps”

When the French army medical auxilliary Olivier Messiaen began composing his Quatuor pour la fin du temps in his cell in Stalag VIII-A, a prison camp in Görlitz, the malnourishment from his imprisonment had caused him the strangest suffering: he began to see colors in his sleep, and in his dreams saw the Angel of the Apocalypse bearing a rainbow crown over his forehead, his presence more immense than the world itself, one foot settled in an emerald sea, and the other upon the red earth. This is only part of how the second movement in the Quartet for the End of Time came to be born. The rest of it lays in the end of Messiaen's dream, when the angel raised his hands towards heaven and declared, "There will be no more Time." The movement itself is a slow-moving rhythmic chaos, a whirlwind of dissonances in irregular 3/4 time, where phrases have broken all the rules, endless as the ocean waves that stir from the rainbow Angel's foot in the water. For Messiaen, the end of Time did not mean hopelessness, but a calming dissonance.

Thus, One of the most ethereally intriguing pieces to ever have been composed in one of the most hopeless moments of western history was not written out of fear but out of waiting. . .

. . . How do you explain what is so striking about the sound of dissonance? It seems that humanity has always valued the beauty of regulation: a diamond is cut to be proportional on all sides; to be considered pretty, you must have a symmetrical face; in an ideal world civilization abides by the law. Dissonance, however, is complete disruption, a tonal asymmetry -- yet its unresolved quality can be most intriguing at the least expected moment. There is a certain satisfaction to be found in going against the grain; somehow, dissonance is a most satisfactory discomfort.

For once, something to think about in an all too perfect world. I suppose it's only almost all too perfect.

In the beginning there was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. John 1:1

The verse in Messiaen's introduction to the score the pretext to the fifth movement of the End of Time, "Louange á l'Eternité de Jésus" (praise to the eternity of Jesus.) What colors accompanied such quaint calmness? It is a pleasant distraction from the prior movements; like a haunting song without words -- in the score the solo cello and piano are literally instructed to play infinitely slowly, ecstatically. It is impossible to explain the poignancy of its beautiful sound, but at best it is this: imagine what it would feels like to close your eyes under direct sunlight while laying in the softest grass in world, only the slightest breeze flickering over your skin after having been defeated (perhaps even violently beaten) under the palest shade of blue sky.

In the Book of Revelations it is said that the Apocalypse will come accompanied with the sound of seven angels blasting their trumpets; one could almost expect a Mahler symphony to be playing, thunderous brass blaring from the skies. Instead, Messiaen produces, in the distant sound of an ascending cello, ethereal love. What does it mean, to write of the end of Time and say I love you from a prison cell when the world at large has become filled with so much hate? In the beginning there was the world and the world was with God; perhaps this was the composer's way of expressing, instead of the hopelessness of a tragic end, the hope of some new beginning. An opportunity for something better, maybe.

at this moment

2007-10-15T01:43:00.000-04:00

I'd actually much rather be here:

optical illusions

2007-09-15T01:33:00.000-04:00

"For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can't be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance."

- "The Trees," Franz Kafka

In New York as of two weeks ago. Day by day I am learning to live more with imperfection, both my own and the world's. Mostly my own. Day by day I am getting adjusted to different ideas, and falling more in love with Chet Baker's "My Funny Valentine."

learning to shut up

2007-08-15T18:26:00.000-04:00

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn."
Inns are not residences.

- "Silence," Marianne Moore

from one of the most beautiful books i have ever read

2007-07-08T01:56:00.000-04:00

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? If before the pre-prehistory there already existed apocalyptic monsters? If this history does not exist, it will come to exist. To think is an act. To feel is a fact. Put the two together -- it is me who is writing what I am writing. God is the world. The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. My heart has shed every desire and reduced itself to one final or initial beat. The toothache that passes through this narrative has given me a sharp twinge right in the mouth. I break out into a strident, high-pitched, syncopated melody. It is the sound of my own pain, of someone who carries this world with so little happiness...

The first page of Clarice Lispector's Hour of the Star begins with this passage, which I have found myself drawn to for many weeks, almost months now.

I used to feel really stupid in my literature classes in college whenever someone would a comment about a book like they knew exactly what the author was talking about. However, if there's anything I've learned about being an English major, it's that 90% of the time no one can be completely sure about the suggestions that come out of their mouths. I can make a guess about what she is trying to say, but I am no Lispector, who completed Hour of the Star within a year of her death. I don't know anything about dying and feeling nostalgia for Pernambuco, Brazil, but somewhere in there, there's a way to relate because it comes from another human being.

That can be the most beautiful, or despised, thing about literature -- the foggy parts that you have to determine for yourself. I think this is why sometimes people who dread James Joyce or don't know what to make of him take on Portrait of the Arist or Finnegan's Wake anyway. There's something about the murkiness of books like those which makes you curious as to what the author could have possibly been thinking, and so the best way to come close is, for the period that you read it and perhaps beyond, converse with the text and get to the ending.

Most writers write out of a search for clarification and understanding in life -- I think Lispector's passage suggests that. A friend of mine here put it this way: everyone has this innate voice in their head that's constantly talking to them, but most of us are afraid to listen to what's being said. The frightening thing about some books is that when you read them, you start paying attention to yourself.

Perhaps this is all very blatant. Nevertheless I have been thinking about this for days. I think more than anything I have just been trying to find reason in the things that I pursue because day by day everything feels more illogical. I am tired of the idea of learning for the sake of simply being educated.

It's got to mean more than proving that you're smart enough for law school, I hope.

Pardon the mess.

thank goodness

2007-07-01T22:52:00.000-04:00

At least someone in the media still has their head on straight.

Anyway, I almost forgot how amazing the following are:
- Swimming pools;
- Swings;
- IcePops;
- Microwaveable popcorn;
- Reading under trees;
- Cityless noise;
- Intelligent conversation with people who aren't talking for the sake of sounding intelligent;
- Also, go-karts and laser tag. And putt-putt.
- Also, fireflies (but I had never seen those before until I came here, so that doesn't count);
- (If I wanted to show how productive I'm being, I would add scales and arpeggios to this list);
- Also, Ernst Bloch (whose 1919 Suite I am falling in love with more and more everyday, as much as it drives me crazy).

I wish I could explain what it precisely is that I miss most when I'm at school, but it has something to do with a different kind of atmosphere. I don't know, but for once I don't feel too crazy.

Or maybe just a little.

my life is turning into a twisted woody allen movie

2007-06-24T14:00:00.000-04:00

I am sitting in my dorm room in little Hudson, Ohio. I suppose I could be practicing, or exploring the area for other signs of life. Instead I am sitting in here with my falling-apart suitcases undone, writing nonsense because staring out the window on plane rides always makes me inexplicably sad, just a little. Generally, I have felt strange and sad this weekend for various reasons.

Instead, I will tell a strange little story, that corresponds with my luck of being accosted by strange old men in the library.

So I'm sitting in the computer lab on campus getting stuff done for work, sitting in the chair with my instrument case still on my back. This guy, gray curly-haired with a blue Yankees cap passes by me from the printer, pauses and comments comments that I look uncomfortable. Oh, actually no, I reply to him with a smile, and explain that I'm used to doing it on subway cars. He laughs. He asks what kind of music I play and recommends me a site to get music from, insisting I do it right at that very moment, telling me that Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata inspired him to write poetry, and he would love to be invited to one of my concerts when I perform (he goes to concerts as much as possible when they're free because tickets are so expensive, of course) . Um, sure, I reply, hoping he would sit down now. He sits down, but next to me, to carry on the conversation. And, oh, did I know that he wrote poetry?

Do I like poetry? Yes, I guess I do, reply. He puts his hand over his heart as though he were taken aback and then tells me I should read his poems, then proceeds to print two out for me to read (one in English, one in Spanish, both signed to me personally in their respective languages after he figures out my name). I can read in Spanish? Gasp! (he does the hand thing again) and he tells me he took a few Spanish literature courses including one that almost killed him and made him depressed. He tells me I am beautiful, asks my ethnicity (er, part Salvadorian, except he insists Guatemalan but I am too tall to be Guatemalan) and tells me his life story about living in Cuba, asks if I love my parents, what do I think about immigration, and did I know that I was beautiful and had pretty eyes and was such a simple person? I think he added "simple" because I gave him mostly one-word answers.

Did I know he wrote 4 books, including some on philosophy? (He took a few philosophy classes.) Did I know that the world is a crazy place but that happiness was important nevertheless? Did I know, did I know that he also took a few classes in literature? What's wrong? Why am I looking at him like that? He apologizes to the man behind him for talking so much and keeps going. He tells me it's beautiful that I'm studying literature and makes a list of books I should read (including Tickets for a Prayer Wheel by Annie Dillard and Night by Elie Weisel, because they changed his life). And, oh my lord, I don't look full Hispanic? Half Middle Eastern? Beautiful, beautiful, I am the emblem of universal love. Have I been to Guatemala? I don't remember going, I reply. Did I know that, isn't it funny, how he was just naturally drawn to me because I look uncomfortable and yet he feels like he has such an amazing connection with me? Isn't it amazing? Sure, I suppose.

The conversation goes like this for about 45 minutes, until finally he decides to go back to his work after getting my "e-mail address" and attempting to get my phone number so he could hear my beautiful voice again (because that cell phone in front of me by the keyboard? Definitely not mine.) In fear that he would come back, I leave the computer lab, using a staged phone call from a friend as an excuse so I wouldn't be stopped on the way out. The man must have been at least twice as old as me. Along with his poetry, he signed the back of a card for me with his full name, e-mail address, phone number, and Shakespeare quote ("to be or not to be"). He said he was going to e-mail me a poem a day.

I spent the rest of the evening feeling incredibly dirty and sketched out about whole event, as well as much of the next morning relaying the story to my boss at work. "You gotta be careful about these creeps, they prey on girls in libraries like that all the time," Lisa tells me, and unfortunately I let my politeness get the best of me in those sorts of situations. She also suggeseted I not read the poems. I haven't.

Regardless, thinking back to the weird event, a person like that would theoretically be a dream on the account of three things: 1) if he were, er, much closer to my age, 2), if I didn't have to hear someone talk so much in a computer lab when I had a deadline to work on, and 3) if it hadn't sounded like so much bullshit from a crazy guy who hangs out in collegelibraries. Yes, theoretically, it would be amazing to meet someone who thinks like that.

The day I meet someone who tells me I have a certain beautiful look in my eyes again, I hope I can believe it to be genuine, in a situation that doesn't feel like a big Candid Camera-esque prank. I think it would be nice.

In fact, yes, it would feel amazing, but I must be kidding myself.

"these are the days my friends"

2007-06-14T21:40:00.001-04:00

The day with its cares and perplexities is ended and the night is now upon us. The night should be a time of peace and tranquility, a time to relax and be calm. We have need of a soothing story to banish the disturbing thoughts of the day, to set at rest our troubled minds, and put at ease our ruffled spirits.

And what sort of story shall we hear? Ah, it will be a familiar story, a story that is so very, very old, and yet it is so new. It is the old, old story of love.

Two lovers sat on a park bench, with their bodies touching each other, holding hands in the moonlight.

There was silence between them. So profound was their love for each other, they needed no words to express it. And so they sat in silence, on a park bench, with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight.

Finally she spoke. "Do you love me, John?" she asked. "You know I love you, darling," he replied. "I love you more than tongue can tell. You are the light of my life, my sun, moon and stars. You are my everything. Without you I have no reason for being."

Again there was silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench, their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight. Once more she spoke. "How much do you love me, John?" she asked. He answered: "How much do I love you? Count the stars in the sky. Measure the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon. Number the grains of sand on the sea shore. Impossible, you say?"

"Yes and it is just as impossible for me to say how much I love you. My love for you is higher than the heavens, deeper than Hades, and broader than the earth. It has no limits, no bounds. Everything must have an ending except my love for you."

There was more of silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight.

Once more her voice was heard. "Kiss me, John," she implored. And leaning over, he pressed his lips warmly to hers in fervent osculation.

- "Lovers on a Park Bench," Samuel M. Johnson

(The music in this beautiful stop-motion video is "Knee Play 5" from Phillip Glass' opera Einstein on the Beach. The text is what you hear being narrated around 3:20 minutes in. The text being narrated by the woman is from a poem by Christopher Knowles, whose work is used throughout the opera.)

of interest at BiFF

2007-06-05T11:16:00.000-04:00

The 10th Brooklyn International Film Festival goes on this week! While there are several films that look enticing (and while I anticipate getting a $25 4-screening pass), there are two films that I particularly want to see, out of interest in both personal heritage and current events in my parents' countries.

Have You Another Apple? (Baaz ham sib daari?) is Iranian director Bayram Fazli's 2006 sci-fi film, best described in its synopsis as an "allegorical comedy." The setting is an unnamed Middle Eastern dystopia, and the hero (Zabih Afshar) is "overweight, bald, clumsy, and interested solely in his next meal." The film has already been screened at festivals in Venice, Cairo, Tokyo and Stockholm. I haven't been able to find out too much about it in English, but I'd be interested to see what exactly this allegory leads to given the revolutionary history and current events in Iran today.

Children of the War (Hijos de la guerra) is a debut docementary by French director Alexandre Fuchs and investigates the story of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), the most violent street gang in the world. La Mara Salvatrucha was started in the 1980's by Salvadoran civil war refugees in Los Angeles and boasts over 100,000 members in the United States and El Salvador. In the film, Fuchs explores the root reasons for the MS-13 's existence and the complications it has created both socially and politically. The film is also a contender at the Seattle International Film Festival, where it will be given a world premiere on June 8th.

Perhaps I will say more later, once these films are actually seen.