Accepting zombies

would be easier if we didnt walk upright. In movie space, we are not that particular on being our feet.

The Innocents Abroad

One can never tell what sentence affects a reader.

In Kratchner Caverns Neil Miller included the following from Mark Twains book, The Innocents Abroad:

The memory of a cave I used to know was always in my mind, with its lofty passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its fleeting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations.

Only part way into the book, I havent come across this sentence. So I will be on the look out. My pick from his Versailles trip :

The trees in no two avenues are shaped alike, and consequently the eye is not fatigued with anything in the nature of monotonous uniformity.

Next time I have a complaint with the landscape, I will try to see how one rock is different from another. Or make an imaginary one of my own.

Brother West

I came to this book, after coming across glib Cornel west in Examined Life.

His childhood behaviour piques the reader's curiosity about his future, which known, has one interested in knowing of what caused the turn around. A Good story's element.

A formulation was taking shape in my mind and heart: that the centrality of vocation is predicated on finding ones voice and putting forth a vision.

Louis Kahn's architecture

Looking into this Salk Institute picture, at the ground, it makes me wonder if I am looking at the length of the building. When a gull takes off parallel to it, even then I let the length of it speak.

Where the nouns may lead

When I read Ramses the Great in National Geographic's april 1991 version, I did not think of what I would remember and what not. Today reading of Wayne Shorter's Nefertiti, I was reminded of Istnofret. When words in our domain, become connecting words to new ones, the net widens. Now I have to include Nefertari to that. That speaks for our initial resistance to it.

can we predict sound?

When a person opens a door behind you, you expect it to close in a decent 30sec or so and do not get alarmed when it closes. Recently I found myself shuttering my eyes at a delayed closing of the door. To begin with there was an unexpected movement in the front with a persons appearing but the door shutting amplified it. Can the brain get confused with auditory and visual inputs this way if they dont meet the scheduled occurences?

Catalogue

Recently a student approached a music teacher, to learn to recognise songs. When the teacher realised that the student did not want to learn to sing, he was dismissed. When I heard Low Down of Boz Scaggs, I had already researched on the song and the singer and knew that I could recognise his name if I saw it again. When going through the newsletter of Palo Duro Canyon it was a eureka moment. I had a recent bout of frustration in pinning down India Arie's song Promises. The coffee shop where I first heard it could not place it as it was run as an assortment. Should they not have a catalogue like the assortment chocolate box where the pictures match the name? Now to recognise a song this way from a bunch of them, would call for time on the listeners part. There should be an LCD display of the active song.
Going back to the not yet student, the teacher lost a chance to make a music student.

Iris Murdoch

Around 8 years ago, I got a pointer to this novelsit, but never managed to read her books. If not a book, then a plot. I read 'The Bell'. I wonder how do authors come up with such long drawn, complicated plots. Am I as baffled as a kid who can read the words but not make sense of them in a whole sentence.
Watching the movie 'Iris', with her slipping on the stairs in her red dress, if everyone where to see a quick movie of their life, it would be interesting to see and recall all the incidents that get included and see if they make up the same or an altogether different person.

Plough

Pictures plough the mind better than words in raking memory.
Looking for a picture of Moldboard plow which was used by Steven I. Apfelbaum in his book Nature's second chance, I recalled how as kids we hitched a ride on the wooden rectangular base of a leveller.

Harbinger of spring

I have gone cuckoo over Pablo Neruda's Dazzle of Day more so over the spanish version with its trim words like 'sin tregua' for endlessly and 'sin tabajo' for effortlessly.

OutLast

The worlds shortest man passed away recently
but can the shortest man really ever die
or for that matter any of the
extreme

then incomparable

What is a horse?

Looking at a new horse toy - pink, from the back, with a flat seat equals the tameness of a Beetles looks.
It has none of its body. But still it has its mane and tail. While reading 'Architecture and Cubism', my search led to two giant horses. I will need more time to see the horses.
To sculpt an elephant Henry Moore chips away what is not an elephant.
So what is not a horse?

Kidding

A kid under 5yrs wanted to try eggs today because she forgot how they taste. She kidded her mom about not having peas this day. That is not a surprise, having being kidded before by a child of that age.
When I was around 10 or so, I told myself that I forgot all I read along in the year and thus began an annual spate of learning. Thats not the first time that I forgot. Countless times I repeated the same things to my father. How and when do kids understand the concept of remembering and forgetting? There are some adults too who forget that they are retelling what has already been told before. Opposite of deja vu.

Play

Wrapping my fingers around your eyes, beginning to close from the blinding approach

Recall

Today I was reminded of Pledge

Magritte Dreams

The Enchanted Domain by Rene Magritte.

Going through Magritte's paintings, I recalled the cover page of the book
Embracing the wide sky. Not only does it have the bowler hat man but also the sky filling as in The Great Family

Magritte has used his leaf like post as tree and a pigeon in other paintings, if this book cover is inspired from his then it puts not only the repetition to use, but with the reversal of figure and ground and all in the same work is a collage of similar things.

Brain The complete mind

Survival and Extinction

Island birds didnt need flight for lack of predators. Later they became easy baits for the travel itchy vermins.
What would have been culled earlier lived a little longer.

Sources: The Last flight of the scarlet macaw, Bruce Barcott
David Attenborough , Life of birds - part 1

Nightscape

For a while now, I have obliterated nights view from my life. To make the best of what a window can offer, I moved my table and chair next to it. What sounded like water hesitating in a pipe was a band of rock pigeons. They sent a whirr of air when two cars turned around the corner, before taking to air.
Morning glory has started to bloom in the parking lots. The bushes must have been there a while, but only the flowers made me notice them.

Visitors on Wings

Day before yesterday, in the morning, I saw a bird soaring high above the building. For the past three years, the only birds that claimed the premises are humming birds, roadrunners, gila woodpeckers, grackles, mourning doves and some other chirpies.
There was no crow to foretell.

Whats that on the ground - Melting fast

Yesterday afternoon I was at my friends house. It was raining slant heavily. After feeling its measure, I ignored it when a visitor staring at the rain got our attention to the hail stones. I have seen them more than 15 years ago and didnt ever think if I will see them again.

With the tilted rain, I find myself on a wooden deck. The uneven, isolated stage of Wozzeck.

Later in the evening, I noticed some cacti by the freeway on the red background of soil and found that the roads were lined with a good number of trees. Thinking of this I was reminded of King Asoka's efforts in a similar endeavour. I wonder in which memory stack was this Ashoka tree buried. When I came close to the corner of my apartment complex, I saw pine trees alternate with eucalyptus and thought this feature fills the scape well. Mindscape As Landscape. The choice we make in remembering what we see, in seeing what is there. If I remember the trees by the roadside, I tend to fill the ground with grass in my mindscape.
A few days ago I decided that I should notice something new on the everyday route.

moonscape in Mali,essay in Nomads Hotel, Cees Nootebaum

Books of Past

An interesting manuscript by Al Khalil had a pictorial representation of metre in a circle.

Mud brick mosques

Picture book on Kenya

A locust invasion can not be explained in words as well as in a picture. Some mountain in the background. Transportation - its speed and limits. Hotels. Game. Grevys Zebra. Rothschild Giraffe. Cheetah's run fast but tire so too.
History of bank.
Cheetahs for hunting bucks.

In the Head

Headache

Brain The complete mind How it Develops, How it works, and How to keep it sharp
Michael S Sweeney

trawhile

Readerly present in Gambia through Cees NooteBoom's 'Lady Wright and Sir Jawara: A Boat trip up the Gambia' in his book Nomad's Hotel, I was wondering as a traveller having broken into the foreign land if we ever stop and ask how the actual was different from our expectation.
I had a route in my mind, but was not sure if there was a path to walk. While not spilling coffee walking is still something that I have to master, with 21 sec to cross half the road, I gave myself the liberty to watch a nest in a tall bare palo verde at the corner. A yellow nest made from dry grass. What would an African weaver think looking at this which is so different from its green house. The medicinal smell of weeds being sterilised, reminiscent of the farmers spraying their crops with pesticides, I would only envy spraying colors part of the job.
The path ahead of me is about to vanish. Ahead a saguaro with its two arms on the right side as an upright matador about to start the bull fight. On the right, a grey wall cuts off the plaza that I know my way around. I wont be far from where I should be, I can always retrace. I had a doubt if there was a way out, but the whole point of the walk was to find what was ahead. looking at the tree accesible to the second floor, I already imagined staying there, but soon realised it not possible as it is for senior living.
As I was taking a left turn, yellow reflective signs turned around the corner. A skinny mocking bird on what seemed the size of a black trash can. The neighborhood had me in its thrall again with me living around. Reaching the corner with its name and purple flowers.
The sight of a bus stop brightened me with the prospects of a trash can to get rid of the long empty cup. Only the soon to be moved stop had a make shift plastic trash bag- serves the purpose.
I was wishing on the pavement. As a field came into sight, the path ended. A red tailed hawk was just displaced from one wooden pole to another by another. Discontent with the arrangement, the ouster approached the next pole like there was a kho kho game on. The first hawk only complied, but not before taking a float in the wind. A tree with many branches announced the presence of the noisy birds. I waited to see the occupants. soon they flew onto the wire on the right. Mourning Doves.
When the hawks flew out of sight, I was still on an unpaved path, walking like my shoes were acupunctured with thorns of Puncturevine. Like a stork, on my left leg, I tried picking the thorns out of my right shoe. Taking turns and balancing. After which my eyes skimmed the tiny rocket weed and another braodleaf weed on the ground. Soon on the path, predictability returns.