Journal Entries
Banksy Speaks Out
Posted May 17, 2012
The thing I hate most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people in pursuit of the dollar, leaving us mainly with the slow, the retarded and self-obsessed to become our artists, writers and poets. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
Banksy
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Latest reply: May 17, 2012
Rapinder
Posted Apr 21, 2012
Rapinder Slips into Tongues...
by Daljit Nagra
Dad and me were watching the video--
Amar, Akbar, Anthony. It's about three
brothers separated after the family is parted
by gangsters. You can get it with subtitles, Miss.
When Anthony, who grows up in a Catholic home,
begged Christ for the address of his real parents
then crossed himself, I jumped off our royal red
sofa, joined Anthony with his prayer:
Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary,
four-quartering myself then curtseying a little.
Dad just stared at me, knocking his turban side
to side that I almost thought it would come off
which it normally does when he's doing his press-ups
and his face goes mauve. Instead he took off
his flip-flop (the one with a broken thong),
held it in the air, shouting in 'our' language,
Vat idio! If you vant to call on Gud,
call anytime on anyvun of our ten gurus,
Do you tink is white Gud's wife your mudder?
Dad's got a seriously funny way Miss,
sometimes he cries, and says he's going to give me
to a Sikh school, a proper school. That's why
I did what my cousin Ashok does at our local
temple -- while you were all doing hail mary
to end registration, I first locked my hands,
knelt down, prayed with this ditty we do on Sundays,
imagined the Golden Temple and our bearded gods
to your up-on-the-cross one, then roared:
Wahay Guru!
Wahay Guru!
Wahay Guru!
Like that.
['our' language = Punglish]
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Latest reply: Apr 21, 2012
anyone who would kiss a butterfly
Posted Apr 9, 2012
anyone who would kiss a butterfly
must be loving, gentle, wise
able to surprise
this miracle angel of the flower beds,
this nectar-druggéd vision
of happyjuice, of life after God,
this living gift, destroyed
by the cringefull clumpiness with which we walk through life
or the traffic, mad on the road, by which we drive to death.
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Latest reply: Apr 9, 2012
Dockery and Son by Philip Larkin
Posted Apr 7, 2012
Dockery and Son (excerpt)
BY PHILIP LARKIN
(And age, and then the only end of age.)
Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got
And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
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Latest reply: Apr 7, 2012
Aubade by Philip Larkin
Posted Apr 7, 2012
Aubade
BY PHILIP LARKIN
[Look for the terrifyingly matter-of-fact last line, made more terrifying by its clever inversion]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDr_SRhJs80
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
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Latest reply: Apr 7, 2012
Jabberwock
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