Saturday, August 20, 2011

closing the parenthesis

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What is another language? Not just words and rules you don't know, but concepts too for feelings and ideas you never knew, or thoug...
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departures (11)

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Even the weather seems to have gently yielded to the melancholic mood -- and I would be filled with gratitude if it just snowed tomorrow. ...
Wednesday, August 17, 2011

last things

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It is strange indeed how seemingly trivial everyday activities -- having a bath, making a cup of tea, listening to the sounds outside before...
Tuesday, August 16, 2011

it is the best of times, it is the worst of times (3)

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What a fine little poem to bump into in an (almost) empty house amid the rubble and the remains of an abandoned life. Another serendipit...

Fuses, again

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Donald Richie's comment on the denigration of women in pornography has reminded me of a text I posted here almost two years ago, and wh...
Monday, August 15, 2011

the future

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The Western world and many of its time-honoured values, beliefs and social systems -- human rights, multiculturalism, the welfare state, ...

departures (10)

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Not that it brings any reassurance or comfort. Compiling all these thoughts, musings, ruminations, is not so much to pave the way for the ...
Sunday, August 14, 2011

through queer eyes

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A fine review of Donald Richie's latest book of essays  in today's edition of The Japan Times , a review which does justice to his u...
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first intimation

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Manuscript upon manuscript, day upon day, consecutive separations from what we love, winter is approaching . . . . ---Maria Gabr...
Friday, August 12, 2011

departures (9)

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What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country . . . we are seized...
Thursday, August 11, 2011

it is the best of times, it is the worst of times (2)

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And yet another small serendipity that mitigates the exhaustion and discomfort of departure. How strangely comforting indeed to find this lo...
Wednesday, August 10, 2011

I want, if older, still to know

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Despite all the frenzied days of packing and preparations, the stocktaking is inevitable and the thought visits you ever so often. How, in...
Tuesday, August 9, 2011

it is the best of times, it is the worst of times (1)

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... when it arrives, the moment to pack these most precious of belongings into cardboard boxes and send them to a faraway place -- and I...
Sunday, August 7, 2011

a principle of kindness

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Davood Emdadian The deep desire for beauty, which is also a desire for the new, the unexpected. That which is most repressed because it...
Saturday, August 6, 2011

lest we forget

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From this the poem springs; that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned ...
Friday, August 5, 2011

the house

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in that house from afar where she was habitually happy and well imagined, vague hours of a great sadness were formed; the days piled up in...
Wednesday, August 3, 2011

'the loneliness of the long-distance foreigner'...

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I have written ad nauseam on this depressing topic ( here ,  here ,  here , here ,  here  and  here  e.g.), but if doubts still remain about...
Monday, August 1, 2011

writing matters (4)

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The invading  letter  I could have written, I should have written, no matter what. But will never write. You are not a memory, you ar...
Saturday, July 30, 2011

no fixed address (2)

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It takes half a lifetime to learn them, those much discredited qualities – the disregard for borders and hierarchies, the lack of deference,...
Thursday, July 28, 2011

no fixed address (1)

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[O]ne wrong turning occurred when we gave up cultures of movement for cultures of accumulation. I do not mean to say that we should (or ...

between worlds, again

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How difficult it is to remain just one person. Our home is open, there are no keys in the doors, visible ghosts come in and out at will. --...
Monday, July 18, 2011

departures (8)

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And so it is. Preparing to take chances again. Plunging headlong into another culture so utterly different from my own, beyond t...
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Sunday, July 17, 2011

Longing (2)

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There are intervals like this, when you go beyond your personal pain and reach some kind of grace, or something approaching peace with you...
Saturday, July 16, 2011

Longing (1)

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Tell me, men of learning, what is Longing made from? What cloth was put in it, that it does not wear out with use? Gold wears out, silver w...

the murmur of the world (2)

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Computer technology, driven by the pilot-industries of the military-industrial complex, places top priority on transmitting the message as ...

the murmur of the world (1)

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How painfully meaningless, despite the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated means at our disposal, what passes for communication has ...
Friday, July 15, 2011

songs of exile (4)

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Heading seawards, I am called on by memories of  my own forgotten tongue and its songs of exile . And there I linger. Madredeus ...
Thursday, July 14, 2011

departures (7)

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This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.     --T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men . I only wish departure did too: with a ba...

on the wire

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A strange combination, but so ironically in tune with my current mood. Los olvidados on the wire. Leonard Cohen, Bird on the Wire ...
Wednesday, July 13, 2011

torn between sea mists and solid land (2)

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One of my favourite selkie stories, a tale of love found -- and lost. The Goodman o' Wastness The Goodman o' Wastness was a ha...
Tuesday, July 12, 2011

torn between sea mists and solid land (1)

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There have been sirens, mermaids, ondines, naiads, Loreleis -- all sorts of shape-shifting, feminine creatures of the water, whose manifold ...
Sunday, July 10, 2011

'the nymph with the broken back', or: enduring misogynistic clichés...

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Scene from Alban Berg's Lulu Soloists, English National Opera, 2005 http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2005/Jan-Jun05/lulu1...