A beautiful excerpt from Mark Strand's poem The Next Time, from his book of poems Blizzard of One

Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.
Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
And so many people we loved have gone,

And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds
Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this

Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew
How long the ruins would last we would never complain.

...

Life should be more
Than the body's weight working itself from room to room.

...

It could have been another story, the one that was meant
Instead of the one that happened. Living like this,

Hoping to revise what has been false or rendered unreadable
Is not what we wanted.

Actually...this excerpt-ing of lines that vibe with me does not do justice to this beautiful poem. Do read it in its entirety here.

Need to read the much-lauded villanelles from the same book- "The Philosopher's Conquest" and "The Disquieting Muses"; poems that were inspired by works by the Italian surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. (Also this article which probes further the parallels between painting and poetry.)

In the meantime, here is a NYT review of the book, an interview and an audio interview with the poet, and some more of his beautiful writing.

Sumptuous writing...via the New Yorker magazine. This is why I am not really a poet...only a wannabe!

Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
- from Wanting Sumptuous Heavens, a poem by Robert Bly

Like Charles Wright writes elsewhere:

The basic pleasures remain unchanged,
and their minor satisfactions
...
The world as we know it,
keeping it fresh-flamed should tomorrow arrive.

Also this short poem, titled Consolation and the Order of the World, also by Charles Wright that packs a wallop in a few words - reproduced here in its entirety

There is a certain hubris,
or sense of invulnerability,
That sends us packing
Whenever our focus drops a stop, or the flash fails.

These snaps are the balance of our lives,
Defining moments, permanent signs,
Fir shadows needling out of the woods,
night with its full syringe.

and one last one - not because there is a shortage of poems at the New Yorker or elsewhere but because I have to stop somewhere. This one is titled We Hope that Love Calls Us, But Sometimes We’re Not So Sure and is also by Charles Wright.

Autumn night at the end of the world.
In its innermost corridors,
all damp and all light are gone, and love, too.

I'll leave you with a link to some more of Wright's poems and an interview with him on PBS , after he won a Pulitzer prize in 1998 for his book of poems, Black Zodiac.

Its one thing for Playboy to research breasts (NSFW) but all these scientists researching breasts! Phew.. :)

Bouncing breasts spark new bra challenge
Hot on the tail of research that shows the average female breast size has increased in recent years is a new study from the UK that shows breasts move more than a standard bra or brassiere can cope with.

Also: Breast Size Attraction-to-Repulsion Survey

In all human relationships, with respect to interpersonal attraction and interpersonal chemistry, an ever-present amount of “balancing” attraction and repulsion reactionary tendencies function to facilitate the formation and dynamics of human bonding. In stable long-term marriages, for example, 5-to-1 ratio of attraction-to-repulsion functions as a stabilizing ratio. When repulsion tends to predominate at a higher ratio than this, such as 5-to-2, divorce or relationship breakup is inevitable, unless a significant change occurs.

Also, this supposed correlation from a journal simply called The Breast (no..it isn't Phillip Roth's book by the same name - it's an actual scientific journal from Elsevier!)

Breast cancer and the role of breast size as a contributory factor!

Here is another research study about differences in ideals and stereotypes associated with breast and chest size, delineating the differences in men and women's perceptions and preferences.

Damn... and why did I become a chemical/polymers guy? Well.. I could have been researching silicones...but I hate the very look of them fake boobs (sorry.. no links! Go google it yourself..what kind of a site did you think this is? :))

Related: The Power of Cleavage

So... if you're a business woman reading this blog -- remember -- cleavage IS power - and you must be aware of using your cleavage power responsibly!

I recently started reading Enduring Love* by Ian McEwan and got through more than half of the book on a 6 hour cross-country flight a few weeks back. However, although I was gripped by the novel, I did not get back to it until this past weekend. McEwan is one of the best writers I have read -- have read Amsterdam & Comfort of Strangers before this (and also started Black Dogs but do not remember much and know I did not finish it..so I count it as unread) and hope to read Atonement next. But now, instead of a review of the books, at which I would be no good at, here are some excerpts from the book for your enjoyment.

First up is a well-written and quite insightful paragraph about memories, half-truths, perceptions and objectivity.

No one could agree on anything. We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense of data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favour and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy. We’re descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track – when it didn’t suit us we couldn’t agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes, and wars, and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature. Disinterested truth. But it couldn't save us from ourselves, the ruts were too deep. There could be no private redemption in objectivity.

A couple other random sentences from across the book that I liked..

Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.

A man who had a theory about pathological love and who had given his name to it, like a bridegroom at the altar, must surely reveal, even if unwittingly, the nature of love itself. For there to be a pathology, there had to be a lurking concept of health. De Clerambault's syndrome was a dark, distorting mirror that reflected and parodied a brighter world of lovers whose reckless abandon to their cause was sane.

And many gems in chapter 5, some of which I reproduce here..

The relentless plainsong of the divorce novitiate - the pained self-advocacy that hymns the transmutations of love into hatred or indifference. ..... To calm myself I turned to that evening clinic of referred pain, the TV news... What soothed me was the format's familiarity: the war-beat music, the smooth and urgent tones of the presenter, the easeful truth that all misery was relative, then the final opiate, the weather.

Within twenty minutes I had drifted into the desired state, the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought. It doesn't always always happen to me, and I was grateful that night. I didn't have to defend myself against the usual flotsam - the scraps of recent memory, the tokens of things not done or ghostly wrecks of sexual longing. My beach was clean.

So the meanderings of narrative had given way to an aesthetics of form; as in art, so in science.

Work had settled on me a veil of abstracted contentment...

There are times when fatigue is the great aphrodisiac, annihilating all other thoughts, granting sensuous slow motion to heavy limbs, urging generosity, acceptance, infinite abandonment. We tumbled out of our respective days like creatures shaken from a net.

And quoting Keats from one of his last known letters written almost three months before he died to an old friend, Charles Brown.

I'ts rather stately in tone and typical in throwing out, almost as parenthesis, a brilliant description of artistic creation: "the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach."

And these two excerpts are wordy but real good examples of how descriptive and evocative words can be. I do not have an eye for details and could never write like this!

I loved the pitch and roll of the fields and their scatterings of chalk and flint, and the paths that dripped across them to sink into the darkness of the beech stands, certain neglected, badly drained valleys where thick iridescent mosses covered the rotting tree trunks and where you occasionally glimpsed a muntjak blundering through the undergrowth.

and this description of a person..

It wasn't the pallor that was repellent, it was the puffy, inhuman geometry of its roundness. A near-perfect circle was centered on his button nose and encompassed the white dome of his baldness and the curve of his fattened chin. This circle was inscribed on the surface of a barely misshapen sphere. His forehead bulged, his cheeks rolled out tightly from below his little gray eyes, and the curve was picked up again in the bluish undimpled bugle between his nose and his upper lip.

I am through to about page 200 of this 248 page novel and am sure there are a few more gems to find in the last fifth of the book, not that I have transcribed all the beautiful writing here from the first 200 pages. The beauty and joy in reading an McEwan novel - based on all three I have read so far - is that the language is so beautiful (and difficult at times) but at the same time the story itself is unique and gripping. Both Amsterdam & Comfort of Strangers had very unexpected turn of events at the end, disturbing in the latter case, and I look forward eagerly to finishing this novel tonight.

* What a great title. What a great pun on the word "Enduring".

Uber-Cool Website Designs

HBO-Voyeur...a very cool website... followed one guy leave a woman and kid out of a room, as he run out of the room to the stairwell outside, then when I move up one stair, he is still there..running up the stairs! Interactive genius!

Saizen Media

Great haiku but more importantly, its very creatively presented. A winner. Creativity overload!

Breathtaking photos of Africa

Uber-Cool Stuff

Detailed images of a complete miniature city

Detailed minitature dollhouses

Incredible Oragami

It was tough to read Lovely Bones, which told the story of a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl who looks down from heaven as her death remains unsolved, and I didn't read beyond the first few pages when I had picked it up at the public library in 2005.

Well... Alice Sebold delivers an equally tough and bleak story in her latest novel, The Almost Moon, which begins:

"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily"

.... which is what the protagonist of the novel, Helen Knightly says after smothering to death her 88-year-old mother, suffering from dementia, on the patio behind her home. And what perhaps makes it disturbing (based on my reading the link above) is that..

Helen's is not a freak crime of malicious intent, nor even a loving attempt to put her mother out of a degrading misery. It is a fantasy of revenge, acted out. "Once begun," Helen says, "I did not stop. She struggled, her blue-veined hands, with the rings she feared would be stolen if she ever took them off, grabbed at my arms...I held the towels for a long time, staring right at her, until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died."

Read another review of the book at the Village Voice.

TED Talk by Skeptic Society founder Michael Shermer explains why humans believe in the strangest of things and how they justify it to themselves....

In the absence of sound science, incomplete information can combine with the power of suggestion. In fact, he says, humans tend to convince ourselves to believe: We overvalue the "hits" that support our beliefs, and discount the more numerous "misses."

This is like that scandal a few years ago that movie reviews were written by people paid for by the big movie companies! Absolutely ridiculous to have a Bestseller list of books that are not really best sellers but books the list-maker wants to promote! Is there nothing we can believe in today? Everything is about spin and make-believe?

Tim Harford, joint-winner of last year's Bastiat Prize, who blogs here, writes:

Are the bestseller lists made up?

Seth Godin thinks so:

The Times' list is completely fictional. Made up. Divorced from reality. The stated goal of the list is to find (and promote) books that Times editors want people to read, not books that are actually selling a lot. (The editor of the Book Review told this to me years ago). So, they make up 'rules' to appear consistent. When Harry Potter was selling like crazy, they invented a new list so that they could take JK Rowling's books off the real list. When diet and other books started selling a lot, they made up a new ghetto (miscellaneous) for those books. When books started selling in places like Wal-Mart (thus driving the snootiness factor down) the Times penalized sales in chain outlets. And books like the Bible are banished because they're not current enough.

He seems to have a point. Here's the article that got him started:

Why does “Night” become an evergreen [and therefore dropped from the list] at 80 weeks when Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” remains on the list at 164 weeks?

An interesting (and well-written) essay in the Poetry magazine, though I read it in the 2007 Pushcart Prize XXXI - Best of the Small Presses - Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer by Mary Karr

Any attempt at prayer in this state is a slow spin on a hot spit, but poetry is still healing balm, partly because it’s always helped me feel less alone, even in earliest childhood. Poets were my first priests, and poetry itself my first altar. It was a lot of other firsts too, of course: first classroom/chat room/confessional. But it was most crucially the first source of awe for me, because it eased a nagging isolation: it was a line thrown to my drear-minded self from seemingly glorious Others.

From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet’s burning taper touched some charred filament in my rib cage to set me alight. Somehow—long before I’d published—that connection even extended from me outward. Lifting my face from the page, I often faced my fellow creatures with less dread. Maybe secreted in one of them was an ache or tenderness similar to the one I’d just eaten of. As that conduit into a community, poetry never failed me, even if the poet reaching me was some poor wretch even more abject than myself. Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its mojo was a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst—dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

Do read the entire essay here. Lot more gems there, including

People usually (always?) come to church as they do to prayer and poetry—through suffering and terror. Need and fear. In some Edenic past, our ancestors began to evolve hard-wiring that actually requires us (so I believe) to make a noise beautiful enough to lay on the altar of the Creator/Rain God/Fertility Queen. With both prayer and poetry, we use elegance to exalt, but we also beg and grieve and tremble. We suffer with prayer and poetry alike. Boy, do we suffer.

Also, this sentence where I get the title from:

In my godless household, poems were the only prayers that got said—the closest thing to sacred speech at all...............Poetry was the family’s religion. Beauty bonded us.

http://www.list.co.uk/article/5127-condom-commandos/


International Human Rights Film Festival
http://www.list.co.uk/article/5129-document-5/
www.docfilmfest.org.uk

http://www.list.co.uk/article/5109-manji/
http://www.list.co.uk/article/4163-lady-chatterleys-lover/

Winner of Best First Collection for 2007 at the UK Forward Prize for poetry went to Daljit Nagra, 40, from north-west London, for his book of poetry - Look We Have Coming to Dover.

The book has had quite a few rave reviews, corroborated by those who have read it and written comments at the above amazon.com link!

More information about the poet and his work:

With Sikh Punjabi parents who came to Britain in the late 1950's, Nagra took inspiration from his personal life exploring ideas of identity and immigration in contemporary Britain, whilst also acknowledging a rich literary tradition by paying homage to the nineteenth century poet Matthew Arnold and his poem Dover Beach, itself an expression of a modern sensibility. Yet, instead of the outward look at conflicts abroad, Nagra reverses the gaze to immigrants coming to Britain and to those who have settled here successfully.

The title poem, which won the Forward Prize in 2004 for best single poem, and a few others can be read here.

Paris Review is a great magazine, which I like most for its fabulous interviews with famous writers in its The Art of Fiction section. I picked up the Winter 2006 issue at the public library couple days back and thoroughly enjoyed reading the interview with the Spanish author, Javier Marias, who I must admit, I had never heard of before.

First up...the priceless line from the interview, which I borrowed for the title of this post, and which would make a great title for a poem or short story or a book even! To me, it defines what writing should be about and what in fact life should be all about.

One must have courage to see what one does see and not to deny it for convenience.

Here is an extended excerpt that I loved (all emphasis mine):

Q: Does a reader need to read all of your books to fully understand your work?
A: ...... I don't understand what is meant by being "fully understood." You don't write books to be understood, do you? That is not the reason for doing it.

Q: What is the reason for doing it?
A: ....... Maybe I write because it is a way of thinking that has no possible match. It is a very active way of thinking. You think more clearly when you have to put something down in words........ Some have said that writing is a unique way of knowing, but it is a unique way of recognizing. This happens very often in Proust in particular. You read something and you say, Yes, this is true, this is something I have experienced, this is something I have seen, I have felt this, but I wouldn't have been able to express it the way he has. Now I really know it. That is what the novel does better than any other genre or any other art, in my opinion. I wouldn't say that I think best when I am writing. But I think differently.

Q: Is that what you mean when you've written of pensamiento literario - literary thinking?
A: The term is not new, of course. As a reader - and I am more of a reader than a writer, we all see, I suppose -- I can enjoy a good story, but in a novel, which takes time to read, a good story is not enough for me. If I close a book and there are no echoes, that is very frustrating.* I like books that aren't only witty or ingenious. I prefer something that leaves a resonance, an atmosphere behind. That is what happens to me when I read Shakespeare and Proust. There are certain illuminations or flashes of things that convey a completely different way of thinking. I'm using words that have to do with light because sometimes, as I believe Faulkner said, striking a match in the middle of the night in the middle of a field doesn't permit you to see anything more clearly, but to see more clearly the darkness that surrounds you. Literature does that more than anything else. It doesn't properly illuminate things, but like the match it lets you see how much darkness there is.

Q: It's interesting that you mention light and darkness because the characters in your novels often entertain powerful illusions, and self-delusions.
A: Illusions are important. What you foresee or what you remember can be as important as what really happens. We usually tend to tell our own story by mentioning only the positive things, but there is also a negative part of your life that forms you: what you didn't do, what you renounced, what you didn't dare to do, what you doubted and discarded, what you dreamt of, what you expected, what you left aside, what you didn't study but thought you would, the job you didn't take, the job they didn't give you even though you wanted it. The things youo're not are a part of you as well. We avoid talking about these things, even to ourselves,a s if they don't count. In my novels, I want them to count.

And here is an except which I completely identified with -- I do not understand music but I love it!

Q: You've written nonfiction books on film and on football - two of your passtimes. What else absorbs you when you are not writing?
A: I listen to music often. I probably consider music the highest art. In a way, I would like to make something like it with words, but that is not possible. The problem with words is that they cannot not have meaning, whereas music is so blessed: it can not have meaning. And yet there are some notes that immediately make you feel meancholic. Why is that? With words, you are telling something awful or sad -- of course, it would make the reader feel that -- but with music it's quite mysterious.

Also, gems that would be priceless for a budding writer:

The older I am, the less I understand the process of writing. I write every page as if it were the only one. It seems very odd and strange to me that something comes out in the end and it's this many pages and I know that I have done it line by line.

and

Q: Is there one quality that a novelist should have?
A: Patience.

Q: In Written Lives, you note that Joseph Conrad's natural state was "disquiet bordering on anxiety." What is your natural state?
A: Indecision -- but that doesn't mean I never decide. It means I take my time.

Aah.. I'm going to use that when I get blamed for being indecisive next time :)
--

* This reminds me of my recent attempt to read Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. Too long... witty & ingenious...but after a while it got so long and drab that I didn't care any more and after 550+ pages, I gave up!


Note to self: Next interview to read is in the Summer 2007 issue: the iconic 'American Master' Norman Mailer ....on God, fighting, growing old, and the art of fiction

What? Not naughty? Knotty, you say? Damn English and its phonetics :)

Two physicists used string-tumbling experiments and mathematical models to create a step-by-step recipe for knot formation and determined which factors cause the knottiest knots.

Can I say that again...naughty knot....knotty naughty ...knottiest knot...not a knotty knot? What a karfuffle! Ok.. I need to stop now. ... before I get you all tied up in knots with my humor...NOT! :)

...so says, Carlo Rovelli, Physicist at the Institut Universitaire de France & University of the Mediterraneum and Author of the book, Quantum Gravity

I am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does not exist. I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that makes no use of the notions of space and time at the fundamental level. And that this way of thinking will turn out to be the useful and convincing one.

Read the complete essay,written as part of the very fascinating series of answers to The Edge's 2005 Question to the world's leading thinkers and intellectuals: "What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?"

Read it online or buy the book: 120 contributors & 60,000 words - it is a treasure-chest of fascinating thoughts and hypothesis... flights of imagination...theories, some believable (but unprovable, of course) and some really far-out there and in the realms of science fiction (today).

Fascinating stuff!