I just hit the Google news tab, and learnt that Steve Irwin, the one man who makes me switch the channel to Animal Planet on the rare occasions I watch TV, has died in a freak accident with a sting ray. Here is a YouTube Video in which he is hamming it up. RIP Stevo. :(

Nikos Kazantzakis's "Zorba the Greek" is a novel I have read three of four times; and I have seen the classic movie based on this novel more than a dozen times. To write critically about something that imprints itself on you is extremely hard, so I won't even try. For me, it is happiness enough to recall the mad laughter of Zorba (played by Anthony Quinn in what is surely his role of the lifetime), and the way he looks at the Boss (the narrator of the novel, an introspective intellectual, or in Zorba's words, a quill driver) and says this:

"What d'you lack? You're young, you have money, health, you're a good fellow, you lack nothing. Nothing, by thunder! Except just one thing - folly! And when that's missing, boss, well ..."

or this:

"You want to build a monastery. That's it! Instead of monks you'd stick a few quill drivers like your honored self inside and they'd pass the time scribbing day and night. [...] Well, I'm going to ask you a favor, holy abbot: I want you to appoint me doorkeeper to your monastery so that I can do some smuggling and, now and then, let some very strange things through into the holy precincts: women, mandolins, demijohns of raki, roast sucking pigs ... All so that you don't fritter away your life with a lot of nonsense!"

Now I know I am more like the Boss (with his reticence to going after women, especially beautiful ones like the Widow, played by Irene Papas) but I think I aspire to be Zorba, a volcano of pure passion, a man given to direct action or as Kazantzakis describes him:

"That is what a real man is like [...] A man with warm blood and solid bones, who lets real tears run down his cheeks when he is suffering; and when he is happy he does not spoil the freshness of his joy by running it through the fine sieve of metaphysics."

And of course, I desire to meet a Zorba too, who will teach me to dance the sirtaki, set to that wonderful music composed by Mikis Theodorakis, like this:

Child of my winter, born When the new fallen soldiers froze In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows, When I was torn

By love I could not still, By fear that silenced my cramped mind To that cold war where, lost, I could not find My peace in my will,

All those days we could keep Your mind a landscape of new snow Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below, His fields asleep

In their smooth covering, white As quilts to warm the resting bed Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread For me to write,

And thinks: Here lies my land Unmarked by agony, the lean foot Of the weasel tracking, the thick trapper's boot; And I have planned

My chances to restrain The torments of demented summer or Increase the deepening harvest here before It snows again.

Note: Also take a look at Snodgrass's brief talk on how poems (including this one) in his first book, "Heart's Needle" (credited for making "confessional" poetry legit after being declared illegal by the T.S. Eliot cabal) got made