On this day in history...

Pour one out for the old boy! James Joyce died sixty-eight years ago today.

Heirloom

I.
In the grave days of small wonders,
quarried bones and headstone halves gleaned through ceiling holes,
secrets coupling with house ghosts, retrieving mementos
from closets, from bedrooms
at odd hours throughout the night

and straight into winter
and straight into morning

II.
Remember: Exposure

TV buzz, bellyaching
sans love
all the great drones of a great haunted house

our very own. Remember:
Porcelain
(shaken memories from the shelves
shattering on the grubby floors below),
cow hips in the foundation,
cats under crosses,
dead dogs gathering in sewage pools

without a God’s Eye. Remember

the downstairs piano talking
off-key
in the dread hush of something
ghastly taking shape with eyes open

I, in an upstairs twin
beside the curved wall window
gazing into stairs
in the face of time without time,
time without hands
time as endless indifference

in that unearthly moan,
an eternity of just knowing

III.
you, sleeping around in the corners,
in the corner of a room, you were sleeping
around with her, you, with and without my sister
drawing up lies and quick answers.

Then I was afraid just knowing

of my own forgotten sleepwalks,
the secrets I, too thickly harbored
like you, Brother, under woolen covers

the great dusty heirloom
banging about the crooked floorboards.

The Counterlife

I recently received the fifth volume of the Library of America's newly published Philip Roth's Novels and Other Narratives. Here is an excerpt from the book's first novel - The Counterlife - in which Henry (alternating protagonist/antagonist) finds his famous brother Nathan's unpublished novel, which to his surprise serializes all of Nathan's missteps under Henry's name.

Exaggeration. Exaggeration, falsification, rampant caricature -- everything, thought Henry, about my vocation, to which precision. accuracy, and mechanical exactness are absolutely essential, overstated, overdrawn, and vulgarly enlarged. Witness the galling misrepresentation of my relations with Wendy. Sure when the patient is in the hair, and he's got the hygienist or assistant working on him, and she's playing with his mouth with her delicate hands and everything is hanging all over him, sure there is a part of it that stimulates, in the patient, sexual fantasy. But when I am doing an implant, and the whole mouth is torn open, and the tissue detached from the bone, and the teeth, the roots, all exposed, and the assistant's hands are in there with mine, when I've got four, even six, hands working on the patient, the last thing I'm thinking is about sex. You stop concentrating, you let that enter, and you fuck up -- and I'm not a dentist who fucks up. I am a success, Nathan. I don't life all day vicariously in my head -- I live with saliva, blood, bone, teeth, my hands in mouths as raw and real as the meat in the butcher's window.

World Record Skateboard Slalom

12/29/08

One more car ride
with the radio playing
music, like Boston
so wholly inappropriate
for tight quarters
and weekday nights
then I just might take the wheel

Mozart of Madras

Who is A.R. Rahman?

According to his very modestly designed and unpretentious official website, he "is the pride of the Indian nation and a role model for millions around the world." Further perusal of the biography section (which is accessed through a flash-animated marble-arched doorway and flanked by Pegasi and seagulls) also reveals that he is a prolific film composer with scores of Bollywood and western studio films to his credit.

Most recently, he did the music for Danny Boyle's thrilling and awesomely sentimental Slumdog Millionaire.

Here's one of his older and more popular songs, "Chaiyya Chaiyya," (I believe Spike Lee appropriated it for Inside Man) from the film Dil Se:

"One shoe, two feet"

for Emily Dickinson

1
One shoe, two feet -
indiscreet -
but incomplete.

Sour kisses -
understood -
climbing higher -
burning wood.

"I wrote some lines
to catch a tune
I'd sing to you
when you were blue."

Rhyming is
- not -
hard to do,

Loving is
- quite! -
fun for you;

2
are you ever afraid
of your fluttering feet
touching the sound
of unhallowed ground?

Once you touched roughly
the amateur stubble
of the not-yet-grey
trouble
I was-am-now-not:

i.e., Eternity winked but you missed it.

Thus and therefore:

you wished me away
and so I went
- quickly! -
and now I am
- glad. -
to be present
in everyone's absence.

I shall pet you now

Postcard II

lately,
i've been peeing
in the shower
and I seldom make
my bed

but

god is good
and i have a
clean shirt
and a new
haircut

In the Room Where You Sleep

In The Room Where You Sleep (live video version)


Not really sure what this is all about, but I think it's delightful. I believe that's Ryan Gosling at the piano.