Wit and Wisdom from FaceBook

Evgeny Kissin: Happy Birthday

It's Mozart's birthday!

Virginia Woolf

Rabindranath Tagore's voice

Guiomar Novaes plays Chopin's Berceuse

My Winter Poem

Flicker Vertigo

Two old pilots play chess in the park,
hearing aids off, cataract eyes
unable to track disturbances
in an air of newsreel memories.
Contrails corkscrew
toward animals cringing in fur
like dowagers in a bad neighborhood,
and glint struck off a propeller tells a story
begun far from here. It's a parable made luminous
with silver nitrate and dust, about their wars,
when charged images flicked past too fast to register.
Information received at 15 spins/second
always condenses thought to pudding,
ricochets off the exits
under the perpetual threat of fire.
A riffle of stills, too, can fool the eye
into a perception of continuous motion;
the brain fills in what’s missing,
the blanks between light and light,
a corrugated sky hanging over
the theater’s false ceiling. It's where
wounds still bloom, where a pounding
in the temple calls up fists full of summer poppies
pushing through the scarred gray crust of winter.

Pongal

Just when you thought the festival season was over, Pongal is upon us. This is a secular harvest festival, also known as Makar Sankranti and Tamizhar Thirunal (The Festival of Tamils). In Tamil, there is a saying, Thai Pirandhal Vazhi Pirakkum, that means "the birth of the month of Thai will pave way for new things." The festival lasts for four days, during which old clothes are burned in a bonfire, fresh milk is allowed to boil over (the literal translation for Pongal),and a bull-taming contest called Jallikattu is organized. People eat sugar cane and decorate their houses with kolam, and brothers are encouraged to give their sisters gifts of money.

In my novel RESCUING RANU, I set a scene in the third day of the festival:

Nela and Ranu looked out on a passing parade of decorated cattle, horns painted and covered with shining metal caps. Multi- colored beads, tinkling bells, sheaves of corn and flower garlands surrounded their necks. “It is Mattu Pongal,” the girl declared. “End of winter!”

“It is why we take oil baths,” Nela told her. The girl cocked her head. She had only learned the ritual, not the origins. Nela said, “Once Shiva asked his bull, Basava, to go to the earth and ask the mortals to have an oil bath every day and to eat once a month. But Basava made a mistake. He announced that everyone should eat daily and have an oil bath once a month! Shiva banished Basava to live on earth forever. He would have to plough the fields. This is why we appreciate him.”

Something, a detail, the half-glimpsed gesture, a particular scent perhaps, caught Nela’s attention just then. She did not answer Ranu’s stream of questions about the bull, but scanned the scene before her, narrowing her eyes to sharpen her vision. Nearly lost among the commotion of lowing beasts, shouting vendors, and rickshaws, she saw a disheveled man slumped in a chair. He was stirring his drink as if that small motion took all of his strength. His skin, waxy and hanging like steamed folds of fabric, looked feverish even from a distance. Nela’s body recognized him before her brain remembered his name. Gooseflesh rose on her arms.

Gurdjieff Chants "Hymns and Dances" - 01

How About Those Resolutions?

Eleven days into it, how are you doing with yours?

* "New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual." - Mark Twain

* "But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits." - Andre Gide

* "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

*"Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping – rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?" – John Dos Passos

* "For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." – T.S. Eliot

* "Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account." - Oscar Wilde

* "Time has no divisions to mark its passage. There is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols." – Thomas Mann

* "I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me." – Anaïs Nin

Poulenc - Improvisation 7

Birthday boy

Optimism

Woody Guthrie's Resolutions

What are yours? I'm recycling last year's.

Jimi Hendrix - Band Of Gypsys Auld Lang Syne 31/12/69 2nd show

Michelangeli plays Scarlatti - Sonata in C major