Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

A friend of mine posted on our group blog about a blessed experience he had at the Joshua Radin concert last night in NYC. A happy crowd, an acoustic Dylan cover, and a talented (and handsome) performer? Yes, please!

day two

stuck in bed with a medley of bronchitis and swine flu (as diagnosed by your local insta-care) means that i finally have time to post the goods i've been saving up for you, my dear friends.

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
And leave the yellow bark dust
On your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
You could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
you climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
Peeler's wife. Smell me.

Michael Ondaatje

a poem, of sorts

i'm currently lying in bed in a sequined hoody and leggings, swimming beneath a hundred heavy blankets and a floaty sea of kleenexes. i've succumbed to defeat by infantile infectious somethings (i.e. i have literally been coated by a multitude of six-year-old viruses and have been unable to stop coughing for the past four and a half weeks) and thought: oh where, oh where did my transpacifists go?

silly question. you've been here all along.

so i've been doing this little teaching thing for the past few months, and it sort of takes up the entirety of my life. and suddenly, at the age of twenty-three, i have 29 little guppies that i get to kiss and hug every day, and worry about whether they have enough food at home, and whether or not they put the larger number in their hearts as an addition strategy. i run around the classroom commanding "pencils down. hands folded. eyes on me," whilst sprinkling magic math dust on their heads with a tattered silver wand. i teach them how to say nice things to each other, and we practice giving each other compliments. when they do something wrong, they say sorry to one another, and not just sorry, but sorry for ___________, and this is what i can do next time to fix it.

and sometimes, james marshmallow (whose name may or may not actually be marshall), who has the largest smile on planet earth and the smoothest, softest cheeks (which he claims is possible for anyone if you get puffy like him!), when he isn't suspended for rolling down the hall and kicking the principal, or suffering from a high degree of anxiety disorders no six-year-old should ever have to deal with, also plays the apology game.

after kicking at the wall for a half hour and then throwing a screaming tantrum under the table one day:




i was under the table. i'm sorry for going under the table. i love you. i'm sorry, do you accept my apology, do you?

after which, while trying to hide the giant tears rolling down my face, i squeezed his puffiest of cheeks and replied, oh james. i love you so much back, and i accept.

kind of my personal hero

lovely

cayman islands is one of my favorite kings of convenience song and i just found this beautiful b-side that features feist. such a good song for days like these:


if you haven't heard declaration of dependence, their new album, check it out on grooveshark.com!

Ode to Autumn

I had a dinner party on Saturday dedicated to this poem. A really good decision.

By Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cell.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

i can't embed this video, but do watch it! it is truly stunning.

http://scher.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/the-shadows-dream/

beautiful

happy monday

after months of silence, this!

it's the end of the workday, end of the workweek, and i'm reading an interview with author nelson algren [famous for writing about junkies in the 1950s-60s], and just found this paragraph so absolutely honest and correct and beautiful that i had to burst and share it. it could be applied to anything, to any life or lifestyle or person or community, not just heroin addicts. he taps into truth, absolutely unfettered --

Well, there’s always something wrong in any society. I think it
would be a mistake to aim at any solution, you know; I mean, the
most you can do is—well, if any writer can catch the routine lives
of people just living in that kind of ring of fire to show how you
can’t go out of a certain neighborhood if you’re addicted, or for
other reasons, that you can’t be legitimate, but that within the
limitation you can succeed in making a life that is routine—with
human values that seem to be a little more real, a little more

intense, and human, than with people who are freer to come and
go—if somebody could write a book about the routine of these
circumscribed people, just their everyday life, without any big
scenes, without any violence, or cops breaking in, and so on, just
day-to-day life—like maybe the woman is hustling and makes a
few bucks, and they get a little H just to keep from getting sick,
and go to bed, and get up—just an absolutely prosaic life without
any particular drama to it in their eyes—if you could just do that
straight, without anybody getting arrested—there’s always a little
danger of that, of course—but to have it just the way these thousands
of people live, very quiet, commonplace routine . . . well, you’d
have an awfully good book.

FINALLY!!!!

NEW KINGS OF CONVENIENCE!!!!

album out Oct. 10

Rosh Hashanah

Amy and I have been talking about redemption. About the possibility. And the necessity. Mostly about the first moment in fall when your breath, as I said to her, puffs out in wafts. That moment, she replied, it's like the simplest reminder of the simplest fact: we are alive. We are breathing in and out this air and we can see it.

It started because I realized as I was pulling on my long-sleeved blouse that it smelled of last winter. It smelled of settling in the curve of someone's side and huddling under blankets. I have not worn it since, with the summer's heat, and I must not have washed it.

Today, she told me, begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It is one filled with contemplation and repentance. And prayer. And psalms, which I love, because they are a textual sacrifice and an attempt to praise the infinite with words. "I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yeah, I will sing praises unto the Lord."

Amy told me that last Saturday at midnight Ashkenazi Jews began reciting Selichot, or Shelosh-'Esreh Middot, poems seeking the thirteen attributes of mercy listed in Exodus 34. Selichot, prayers as she explained them. Key words being: forgiveness, chorus, binding, we have sinned, and petition. Key words being: compassion, mercy, grace, patience, truth, mercy, pardoning. Seeking, beseeching mercy. Forgiveness for: iniquity, transgression, sin. Key words always, insistently: forgive me, forgive me forgive me. It seems appropriate, she continued, to designate full days, weeks, months of awe—both for the things we lose, and the things we redeem. For the compassion, mercy, grace, and truth in the Lord’s infinite mercy.

And the fall is the perfect time for this, I told her. A time of forgiveness and mercy, just what I ought to feel as the sun is saying I've stayed too long already and blushing behind trees earlier in the evening. And things are getting older. Maybe that's why I'm so anxiously waiting for the cold to come and for the humidity to leave. I am craving the assurance of cardigans and warm soups. There is something comforting in the pain of frosted ears warming again. Probably about the thawing of mercy, of redemption from hurt and bleakness that sometimes doesn't seem appropriate in summer.

It seems all too appropriate, she said, to remember with longing those of our past in this week of remembrance and prayer. The many small misdoings we did to each other, the many tender acts we shared together. Even the scent of them lingering in the hems of things.

Also, Amy ROCKS

Because you're not hardcore unless you live hardcore, right, Miss Best American notable? Wahoo!

Score One for the Home Team

Just wanted to draw your attention to our friend Pat Madden's bound-to-be-awesome (wa waaa) book, Quotidiana, coming out in March. And yes, that's a kookaburra on the cover. "Legend has it that Montaigne kept one in his tower to announce the arrival of bothersome warring factions or emissaries from the king requesting his services" (PM's Facebook wall). I shared this fun fact with my roommate, who then informed me about David Sedaris' latest piece in The New Yorker, which led us in a round about way to the following great video, which certainly makes me laugh a whole lot:

Astor Piazzolla: So Hot.

He plays a mean bandoneon. He wed tango and jazz. He collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges. He had me at Libertango.

(This one kind of jumps in a second or two into it, but it's Yo Yo Ma. And therefore Awesome.)

(The one below is about the fastest I've ever heard the Libertango performed, and I don't like it as much as the versions that keep the bandoneon/accordion sound in there, but this one is tootally worth watching, just for the conductor (see 1.35 and you'll know exactly what I mean). Hoooly smokes.)

On That Note...

Patricia's post brought to mind one of my favorite pieces by one of my favorite composers, Chopin. It's his Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66 and it is rapturous. Enjoy!