Thursday, July 30, 2015

A Blue Moon Day..

and a new find.

Dvorak, Op. 11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZTeavJ9frA

Friday, April 24, 2015

The Library

"Sometimes I think that shadowy, doorless little shelter -- which is all it was really, an empty, empty place -- is where at heart I want to be. Beyond it was a wire fence and then a sloping, moonlit field of grass -- 'the Wilderness' -- that whispered and sighed in the night breeze. Nipping into that library of uncatalogued pleasure was to step into the dark and halt. Then held breath was released, a cigarette glowed, its smoke was smelled, the substantial blackness moved, glimmered and touched. Friendly hands felt for the flies. There was never, or rarely, any kissing -- no cloying, adult impurity in the lubricious innocence of what we did."

~ William to Phil in The Swimming Pool Library (by Alan Hollingurst)

Saturday, August 16, 2014

The Way He Looks

Gabriel: "We have to say the things we feel. We can't keep it inside."
Leo's ringtone for Gabriel.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

a lesser Kafkaesque Kafka..

"In a way, you are poetry material. You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out."

~ Kafka in a Letter to Milena. (He seems hopeful!)

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Chopin's Sadness!

Federico Chopin is probably remembered best for his melancholic, haunting Nocturnes. His etude Tristesse is another beautiful piece of music, complacent, with a hint of sadness or mostly of nostalgia. Perhaps one can trace his tristfulness to his longings for Poland, his beloved country (as I came to know from one of the comments on the youtube link for the etude). 

As beautifully written by Franz Liszt in his biographical work Life of Chopin

"We have before asserted that we must have known personally the women of Poland, for the full and intuitive comprehension of the feelings with which the Mazourkas of Chopin, as well as many more of his compositions, are impregnated. A subtle love vapor floats like an ambient fluid around them; we may trace step by step in his Preludes, Nocturnes Impromptus and Mazourkas, all the phases of which passion is capable The sportive hues of coquetry the insensible and gradual yielding of inclination, the capricious festoons of fantasy; the sadness of sickly joys born dying, flowers of mourning like the black roses, the very perfume of whose gloomy leaves is depressing, and whose petals are so frail that the faintest sigh is sufficient to detach them from the fragile stem; sudden flames without thought, like the false shining of that decayed and dead wood which only glitters in obscurity and crumbles at the touch; pleasures without past and without future, snatched from accidental meetings; illusions, inexplicable excitements tempting to adventure, like the sharp taste of half ripened fruit which stimulates and pleases even while it sets the teeth on edge; emotions without memory and without hope; shadowy feelings whose chromatic tints are interminable;—are all found in these works, endowed by genius with the innate nobility, the beauty, the distinction, the surpassing elegance of those by whom they are experienced."




Tuesday, July 15, 2014

That heart!

"And John tried to see through the morning wall, to stare past the bitter houses, to tear the thousand grey veils of the sky away, and look into that heart -- the monstrous heart which beat for ever, turning the astounded universe, commanding the stars to flee away before the sun's red sandal, bidding the moon to wax and wane, and disappear, and come again; with a silver net holding back the sea, and out of mysteries abysmal, re-creating, each day, the earth. That heart, that heart, without which was not anything made which was made."

~ Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin