Banff Canada, March 1-2, 2007

Ben Zander, the Boston Symphony conductor-demon, addresses the backbenchers, and in the same spirit in which government invites us to pay taxes, asks them to come up and fill the empty front rows

Tells us a story about working with “failing” schools in the Docklands area of London, with black unruly kids, about how to live on one buttock, and touching them with the flame of music

Draws what he calls the radiating circle of possibility, and reminds me of St. Augustine's definition of God, a sphere with the center everywhere and the edge nowhere

Is death the "final solution" to the voice in our head? Perhaps it is.

You can't play music until you have had a broken heart. The "how fascinating" of all great musicians

Neckups are people who by virtue of sitting in front of the computer have lost track of the body that lies below

Fritzchrysler in London's fish market remembers a forgotten concert on seeing a split up tuna

Before a Mozart's piece plays - the story of the great cellist, Jacqueline Dupre at 5, running down the corridor in joy even before she has played.

As Mozart plays, the mind takes off into the surrounding mountain country - Ted Hughes's hawk-like, the spine shivers and sweats, and eyes tear up. This is he closest he has come to a satori in days

Weeping...crying...deeduldoo doodleding, the only and most basic motif of life

Bach's final words at the end of every piece he composed were "for the glory of God"; And Flaming Leaf Quartet took me into that glory

And as the fever is about to subside, Brahms comes on.

Must read “The Ancient Mariner” again, and learn to sing “Ode to Joy” in German.

...

Do you dream in your sleep? Do you live happily ever after? In sleep, does your skeleton fall through a box of lit matches?

Where is your home? I have no photos of that place which was once home. Memory is a gelatin plate left exposed to the sun

Do you remember the tower that kept watch over that bridge of assignations over the rails? I will wait for you there as you make your way to the appropriate circle of hell.

Electricity has the made angels of us all.

Two or three millennia after the Fall and Banishment, Catherine Robb marries the Peter Whyte, a painter and mountain man, under an apple tree in Boston. And then in the mountains they recreate a good life, a paradise, in a house full of letters, paintings, books, curios collected on voyages, and a local community of like minded friends. Now if I am questioned, once more, whether I am married, or why I am not here with a woman, I will reply, I am waiting for a Catherine, to meet under a apple tree, bent under the weight of fruit.

Stoney minstrel bones in a glass cage, and the voice of an young beggar girl, blind and bird-like, set to the beat of two stone clappers, on a train to Bombay, are all connected in his mind

At the bank of a river, he reads this by Kipling: "The Bow doesn't rustle or slide like the prairie rivers but brawls across bars of blue pebbles, and a greenish tinge in its waters hints of snows." He looks at the river along whose banks he has just walked, with new eyes.

At an “elegant dinner”, ambient world music and wine. And at the back of his head a word of Hindustani tapping its foot: dil, dil, dil.

They then play "Sweet Home Alabama", and he misses that city, which sits in the middle of a forest, the city where after a fashion he has become the man he is today.

They then play the song with that refrain "nothing else matters". He is drunk enough to believe that this is so already.

She knows that she is has grown heavy. She dreams that fat hangs from her belly and hips like marmalade or lava. They, the supposedly indivisible unit, have failed recently - in her mind forever, for this failure and its memory stretches far beyond this one - at the games of pleasurable friction. Everything, as before, has again turned desultory and perfunctory. There are always other matters - as whimsical like future shape of a imagined house or as rancid as the argument from the previous day - far heavier than her fat both real and imagined, hanging over their bed, the gladiatorial arena.

That is why he is here, this stranger whose sincere lies were conniving enough for her to go with him, half drunk on the cocktails he had bought her, to his studio apartment, with its strong smell of maleness. She smells the expensive cologne on the sheets in which her sighs and vocalizations are muffled when he enters her from behind with his strange but desiring hardness - the big hard dick they were only an hour ago joking about.

Only in the morning washing her body satisfied and bruised in places where he bit her too hard - does she remember that he had barely touched her body - for example the shadows behind her earlobes, the fine line of hair on her nape, the exact curvature of her spine. And then this line from a novel comes to her – a line used by the one whom she had betrayed in a poem he wrote to her at the very beginning, the beginning of that, which this morning will be the coda and the end:

“Strangers kiss as softly as moths.”

...

He writes he hates her, in English. It is not his language; he has to stop and think every turn of a sentence what he was to say next; he has to translate meaning from the language they normally use for daily speech. But it is effective medium, this English, to spew the anger, which originates primarily in his own self pity, on to paper; throw down blots of ungrammatical sentences, false and narrow, much like the mass manufactured pop songs he had used to woo this woman in the very beginning.

En route to Banff, in the Canadian Rockies for a work retreat, he pursues enRoute, the in-flight magazine of Air Canada out of curiosity, and is surprised to see it filled with literary writing. This is what he copies into the note book he carries around in his pocket, starting with this very relevant gem:

"Spa V at Hotel Victoria offers a blackberry reflexology massage for the Blackberry addict"

Shyam Selvadurai attends the Annual Festival de la Correspondence in Grignan, France, and muses on what we might be losing as our epistolary habits shift from ink and paper to email:

“But apart from what is lost in historical value, what do we lose personally by not writing letters anymore? In this turret, as the cello concert gets underway, the answer comes to me. From rereading my own correspondence, I have met a self almost forgotten.”

Todd Swift is the world's only poetry impresario, who brings his impresario's touch that includes bands drinks performance artists and sword swallowers to your regular poetry reading. The idea is to turn poetry reading into a mass spectacle. The only question is his mind is if poetry turns to spectacle where would Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Bishop fit?

Digital story telling may meet our need to “resocalize” somewhat but nothing will ever beat huddling up to a wrinkled grandmother with her hand caressing your back as she tells you another story - an old memory turned into a tale or a some tale from the rich storehouse of mythology, such the one on why the moon waxes and vanes - told in the dark