'Uber', the latest Orkutee added to my fishbowl (I too swim in it), writes in (on? inside? at?) his blog ( 13th-deja-vu.blogspot.com ):

Nietzsche once said, “In your solitude if you have talent to think deeply about anything but not enough time to write a book about it, then you will make good letter writer.” His corollary: “In your solitude if you have talent to think deeply about anything but not enough time to write a book about it and have a career, then you will make good blogger.”

And it now seems that I to have been infected with a dose of Bloggeria (a close relative of Diarrhea), given the steep increase in the posts in the last week at this echo chamber with windows. My only consolation is I have till date kept stripping on this stage to a minimum. This is not because any reticence on my part, but because of the lack of any human interest stories in my meta-narrative (to indulge in some Whore of Mensa code - must read Woody Allen story found here: woodyallenitalia.tripod.com ) – no sudden seductions in elevators, no car chases, no hiring and firing from jobs, no instant romances etc, if you get my drift. Besides I rather be a voyeur in the Blogspehere, and now additionally Orkut, in the larger service of my waxing and waning literary ambitions.

After that lengthy digression, we come to the point of this post which is to report my latest adventure in bookstores. I had been searching for Nikos Kazanakis’s masterpiece “Zorba, The Greek” in various book stores for the past few days, and it appears as if there is a secret conspiracy to keep Zorba from me. With the view to corral Zorba, I decided to pay my neighborhood academic book store.

I dislike academic bookstores, especially ones that greet you with shelves featuring literary criticism – in my opinion very few writers have the requisite mojo to be allowed to do criticism – and philosophy. After wading through all the tents that have been pitched in the shady indolent groves of Academe since I last looked – all those ‘studies’ ranging from Asses (animals, body parts, myths) to Zulus, I finally reached Fiction, only to find Zorba missing. Billions of blistering barnacles! (Ref: Captain Haddock of Tintin)

Then with terrible wrath I fell upon the discount bookshelves full of academic junk – I don’t even remember any of those book titles, thank the devil! – to discover a nice hardback copy of James Dickey’s ‘Crux - Collected Letters’ for the amazing price of $2.99, to which I murmured to myself a verse from the Mark Strand’s poem ‘Eating Poetry’, “There is no happiness like mine./ I have been eating poetry.”

James Dickey was a powerful poet and a man who lived the myth of a barnstorming, guitar playin, womanizing, hard drinking, archer poet to the hilt. One of his poem’s (Cherrylog Road) ending has been a great talisman of mine, especially when I am drinking hard myself. It goes “Drunk on the wind in my mouth/ Wringing the handle bar for speed/ Wild to be wreckage for ever.”

Also having read other poems from his “The Whole Motion – Collected Poems”, as well a very moving memoir written “Summer of Deliverance” by his son Christopher Dickey, currently Paris Bureau Chief/Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek, I am very glad that I got my hands on this book of James Dickey’s letters.

As an aside another pattern I have noticed in the process of writing this post, is my fascination for letters. In the past year or so, I have read, in full or in part, letters of V.S. Naipaul, Flannery O’Connor and Jack Kerouac. Is this to relive for myself the tedium of not receiving any mail, now that snail mail is a Dodo? However more recently I have been making my emails more formal – in spelling, punctuation and grammar - and saving many of these, with the hopes to sell them for a large amount when I become famous!!

More reports as other mundane things happen here.

What happens when thoughts overtake sentences? Coredump. Readers are invited to construct their own sentences from anything below or from anything else.

@Dogs and Pets #Lifestyle additions #Pet shrinks #Reincarnation into species canine: Street Dog or Lap Dog?

@DD Advertising, circa 1984-1990 #Symbols of an age: Great Indian Epics vs. Reality TV #Songs of innocence #Telescoping time #Controllable entertainment: Google, the first step? #A Conservative Ulysses’ Siren: Hollywood

@Memory and Language #Language = inert symbols? #Freshness, meaning and mental age #Knowing other languages: spillovers #Music switcheroo: rock & Indian film music #Place and contamination of the immigrant’s Id #Questions of travel

@Gods, Man and End of the World #Battle of Prophets #Questions of Rapture #Synthetic religions #Apologists, Smoke screens and Satan #Miracles: Ours vs. Theirs #Bulgakov meets the Devil

[1] IT is very cold this morning,a couple of degrees below freezing, cold for these southern climes, in this city. So this little exercise of the cold fingers, slumbering imagination and tattered heart, by using words in order to approach the giant furnace – Sun - that hangs brightly at these windowpanes overlooking the denuded woods, and wake up. Is this humanly possible one may ask? And I respond, by remembering, very vaguely, a fairy tale – it would be either Russian or African – about a quixotic adventure of a little boy, when told that Sun is his father, sets out to meet him, throwing ladders up into the sky.

So what should we talk about? I say ‘we’ not because I expect a horde of readers clamoring under my windows for these papers I might throw out at them as t-shirts and other tochkes are thrown out to the crowds at rock concerts, but because there happen to be many creatures that live within me. There is the drunk who watches sentimental and maudlin films with great relish and weeps copiously. There is that Dr. Livingstone/ Jim Corbett character who pores over maps and photographs of remote and steamy jungles, as he dreams of wrestling anacondas and stalking big cats. There is the hedonist – some would say sexually repressed – Nero who organizes bacchanals of food, flesh and music. And no I am talking about my occasional spectating at rock concerts. Leaving aside most of the remaining devils who reside within me, we come to the saints marching by, brining up the rear. They are the worst trouble makers, always insisting on beating down God’s door with their hands, foreheads, legs, buttocks etc, not listening to the other devils who say, “Let that poor devil sleep, will you!”

Some buffoon just got up and said, “Hey it is end of another year, talk about it will you.” Brother Buffoon of mine what shall I say – I didn’t blaze or rage rage against the dying of night again. The artistic vows I took up at the end of last year remain unbuckled, safe under covers, bloody fools. If I was man enough, I would have thrown away this yoke of bourgeoisie striving for a stable profession, a house in the burbs and so forth, and fled right away to a perch above a city of daggers and beat myself to death, into some beautiful transcendence, over a keyboard. The buffoon is laughing, “Ha ha ha ha ha!” Thank god, no scratch that, thank the devil, he is laughing. Pity or sympathy would have been worse.

But I have been doing my duties to the books all year. I was such a good customer at a second hand bookstore that they gave me two books for free last week. And the county library folks were greeted with my visits more than they would have liked to see me. Yes sire, I was a regular nanny goat, bleating all night long, masticating on pulp, and avoiding direct experience. Is this what Salman Rushide preached to me, when he gave his subversive lectures here? ‘Stay in the garret, write fantastic reviews of books you have not yet vomited, install a knocker with the visage of Shakespeare - the complete man and curse of all who followed on the high seas behind him - on your door, so that you can bend and touch your forehead on his metallic head every morning, to give you one bloody splendiferous idea!” Oh Salman babajee, I have done that duty too, almost spraining a wrist as I tried to read Macbeth – yes I am drawn to bloody tragedies - from the dangerously heavy Riverside Shakespeare one night. Oh, where are my witches on the heath?

This tawdry whine isn’t piercing enough. No head banging follows as it does in qawwali singing – circling, calling and responding, man, god and the devil rolling down the holy mountain into a bathtub of madness, too much! And it is here I come to the understanding that I have only play acted at madness, never braving the elements or going over to the other side, even once the whole of last year. If I was mad enough, I would have chopped a piece of this heart – what heart is it now, like a small-shriveled raisin! – and given it away to every thing that I saw beauty in – mainly to women and children.