Chaosbogey

(My alternate titles were waisted and cumberbandini, so, you know..)

And where the purple Nullahs threw
      Their branches far and wide,—
And silvery Goreewallahs flew
      In silence, side by side,—
The little Bheesties’ twittering cry
      Rose on the fragrant air,
And oft the angry Jampan howled
      Deep in his hateful lair.

She sate upon her Dobie,—
      She heard the Nimmak hum,—
When all at once a cry arose,—
      ‘The Cummerbund is come!’
In vain she fled: — with open jaws
      The angry monster followed,
And so, (before assistence came,)
      That Lady Fair was swallowed.

… rest of Edward Lear’s “The Cummerbund“ 

Today was love in the time of teasdale. I spent the day (and much of the night) watching Six Feet Under and reading her. It was less depressing than you think. 

I said, “I have shut my heart
As one shuts an open door,
That Love may starve therein
And trouble me no more.”

But over the roofs there came
The wet new wind of May,
And a tune blew up from the curb
Where the street-pianos play.

My room was white with the sun
And Love cried out in me,
“I am strong, I will break your heart
Unless you set me free.” 

Two months, two years, two lifetimes, I dunno. I’ll return to this clanging city, and I wonder if you will come as well, caught in the web of the years that pass? 

Probably not, thank heavens. 

One of the books I’m reading for Everything Essay is Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch.* It claims to be inspired by Antigone, which so far has meant lifting lines off Sophocles. I’m apathetic about the copyright of Dead Greeks- or really anyone- but I do think even ironic self-aware postmodernism should try a bit harder. I reserve judgment till I’m done with both, and thanks to Supriya I know Seamus Heaney did an adaptation of the play. It was duly ordered to supplement my Fagles (lavish flipkarting is one of the perils of living at home. That, and regular meals. Regular hours is a battle mum lost long ago.) 

*on which note, you must see this. (via Aisha.) 

Antigone as Resistance Text is a tested trope, and so far the novel has been redeemed by the scene below, where I learned that martial hipsters are as amenable to condescension as every other variety. I’m reading an uncorrected proof and will impose plaintext on you too. Why suffer alone? 

I point to his iPod. What are you listening to? 

Grohl answers: Gethsemane. 

Is that a band? Yup. 

I don’t think I’ve heard of them, I tell him. What kind of music do they play?

Jackson answers instead: They’re kind of progressive rock, but metallic.

Grohl rolls his eyes, but sits up. They’re not fucking prog, they’re post-prog, he says irritably. And they’re not “metallic”, whatever the hell that means, they’re death-metal, but with an aggravated melodic arc. Okay? 

All right, man, Jackson says, have it your way. They’re like OMG* fucking brutal death metal. 

*din-aside: does anyone actually say OMG? Perhaps they’re texting each other in a Remote Fort in Kandahar (named after the “ancient Indian place Gandhara” or, maybe, Alexander the Great, holy Iskander). 

Bullshit, Grohl says. Gesthsemane is not OMG fucking brutal death metal. Gethsemane is a band that’s way beyond that kind of classification. When they write a song, it’s not like they’re trying to be as satanic and obscure like some cheesy death metal band. They just write from the heart. Some of their songs sound like death metal, some sound post-prog, some have math rock or grindcore influences, while some are just mellow ballads. And that is what makes Gethsemane a fucking awesome band. 

I got news for you, bro, Jackson says. Mellow ballads* are the tool of the undereducated. 

*I first read this as mellow bands. This version is even more glorious; it makes no sense whatsoever. I am in awe. A little later, Grohl insists he mutilated his father for not liking the great Gethsemane and then there’s the highlight of the first 75 pages, so good I’m even punctuating it:

“Amesoeurs!” he spits out in contempt. “Talk about cheese-eating surrender-monkeys!” 

Talk about them indeed. 

I met Swar over a long lovely lunch today to talk about her new project . She’s preparing to rehearse “Dog Women”, inspired by Paula Rego’s art, and naturally I asked if I could read a draft script. She told me they were rehearsing blind, a concept I have trouble grasping even after she assured me “devised performance” is a theatrical tradition. I would be fucking terrified, but that’s why I’m not a performer. 

Anyone acquainted with Lucky Lobster or Fake Palindromes* knows that Swar doesn’t write narrative plays. Her scripts are all atmospheric and subtexty, which is wonderful if you mine them right, but it also means they make very… incomplete reading. It’s odd, really - they reward the imagination if you imagine the movements, the intonations, the stage - but they fall flat unless you do all that practically every sentence. It’s exhausting, often frustrating, and it makes you want to watch the play so someone else does the work. So that’s efficient then. 

*named for the andrew bird song.

It was a splendid afternoon. We talked about Homer and Rego and The Company of Wolves and the anti-futility of philosophy. I will miss many things about Bangalore on my travels, but the subterranean lit community is why I will never leave this city.

AND NOW KUZHALI IS HERE.

After lunch, two friends and I watched The Hudsucker Proxy. Eerie, stupefying, weird, hilarious.. my adjectives could multiply all night. I was trying to remember what led me to the movie on my way home, and realised it was this, which is, of course, the best moment in the movie. Though Tim Robbins’ hypnotic hula skills were a close second, as was “extruded plastic dingus”. It’s a dog! It’s a dildo! It’s… hoopla!

Then I cleaned my apartment for four hours, more than I ever did when I lived there. I am not domestic. My mother’s a retired neatnazi replete with all the excess energy that implies. She declared my filthy exhome unfit for a moving company to enter: “Beta, they will think you descend from monkeys!” (er, mum, I do) Our Uma, never one to be left out of anything, cleaned the microwave I’d just finished scrubbing and mumbled that she would disown her daughter (currently eight) if she dared subsist amidst such squalor. They were in great good humour once they restored the cosmos to order and we went out to dinner, which they spent criticising everything from my mopping music (Who’s Next)to my pencil collection (admittedly extravagant) to my interior decorating (“why’d you put five tables in one room?”) 

Only my family could be so smug about sparkling uninhabited space. Figures the one time my chairs are dustless is the day before they’re trucked elsewhere. 

It was a day in which Life Changes became something one could no longer ignore. I hope I forget it quickly and I hope I don’t and this blog helps me do both. 

For if I am not a sexy paradox, what the busy fuck am I? 

A hula hoop! 

ps: My only reading today was Chris Abani’s “Dog Woman”. It’s a very spatial poem, so I won’t blog it, but do read it. He’s a dog howling moon. 

Today the “nerudalove” bot was tweeting one of my favourite poems. Wonderful as it was to pop in and meet a beloved line, I think it deserves to be read entire. 

I want you to know one thing. 

By that curious symbiosis that stalks everyone, I sometimes read the poem to the cadences of this song. Especially on days as long and as tough as today.  

… seems to me more a peculiar french pastry than a peculiar french radical*. 

“When the National Convention shall be purged of that kind of man, so that people shall ask what a Brissotin was, I will move that to preserve a perfect specimen of one this man’s skin be stuffed, and that the original may be kept entire at the Museum of National History; and for this purpose, I will oppose his being guillotined”

— Rabaut Saint-Étienne, quoted in A Place of Greater Safety. 

holy robespierre. 

*Brissot was a pastry cook’s son, so that might account for it? 

From Punch, May 27, 1903, just before The Return of Sherlock Holmes in The Empty House (The Strand Magazine, October 1903) :

Extract :

Oh SHERLOCK, SHERLOCK , he’s in town again,
That prince of perspicacity, that monument of brain.
It seems he was not hurt at all
By tumbling down the waterfall.
That sort of thing is fun to SHERLOCK.

http://www.madameulalie.org/punch/Back_to_his_native_Strand.html

(via suidas) and

(via trousersoftime)