I.
“The Universe has expanded so enormously,” he [Kilgore Trout] said, “with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard [...]
Oh do I have a chance?
You’re such a pretty girl
I’ll stay till you’re convinced -
there’s evil in this world.
Eef Barzelay (of Clem Snide), “Fight Song Melodies,” from the Rocket Science soundtrack.
(These poems were written in January 2007. The second part was published in 2008 by Meritage Press as part of The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II [available here]. Because it’s part of a set, I’m publishing the entire long poem here for the first time. More below the cut.)
Work is hectic, so blogging has been deprioritized for the moment. I’m singing Mozart’s Requiem on Saturday and Sunday, preparing for a possible John Cage performance at CalARTS in early June (!), and contending with the end of the school year. A few posts are in the works (subjects include Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Bataille, [...]
My fave MeFi post from the past several days has got to be this one, about the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. All of the following links have been lifted from that thread:
Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel lecture “The Poet and the World,” is wonderful, as are the columns she wrote for the Polish magazine Literary Life, in which she [...]
The first two tales are from John Cage’s book Silence (Cage was a practicing Zen Buddhist), and the third was spotted in a thread at MetaFilter.
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I.
A young man in Japan arranged his circumstances so that he was able to travel to a distant island to study Zen with a certain Master for a three-year period. [...]