So I ventured into New York to attend a concert of Brahms's Sonatas as planned; this week's concert seemed to have been more popular than the last week's because when I got there roughly at the same hour I only got one of the farthest seats in the town hall. Which was well because, as I discovered half way through, I wasn't in the mood of chamber music anyway, at least chamber music performed in a big ass concert hall.

Before the concert began, meanwhile, I snuck into the Virgin Megastore on that biggest tourist trap on the planet, Times Square, and polished off a third more of Moshin Hamid's soliloquy as a novel, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist". It reads well, i.e., it is quick, and has managed to hold my ever shrinking attention when I began in last Sunday at the very same store, primarily because Mr. Hamid once held the exact job I have begun at at the turn of this year, and this novel paints, at least that is how I view it, a pretty accurate psychological portrait of an outsider sojourning through the tunnels (instead of halls) of world Capital (blame this usage on my browsing of a biography of Stalin later in the evening). However, the protagonist's soliloquy as a explanation of his slow disillusionment with the "American Way of Life", which subsequently leads to his return to an imaginary Islamic past (he himself claims that he came from a cultured Pakistani upper class family, which was not all that religious) is not, as my bibliophilic friend C put it, all that compelling or convincing. That said, if I am in the vicinity of Times Square next Sunday for a double concert of Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier", I will finish the rest of this book.

After abandoning the Brahms concert, I followed my nose to the desi strip on Lexington Ave to eat a dosa or two at Saravaanas, thanks to Elizabeth's post (whose prose style I "totally" envy btw) that put me on the scent of an excellent, excellent dosa - one of the better ones I ate in North America. Hunger satiated, and topped off with a dose of chicory laced Madras coffee, I headed over to the Strand to see if Jay Griffiths's "Wild" had arrived there yet. It didn't but I did find a copy of her earlier book "A Sideways Look At Time". I also added a cheap copy of Amartya Sen's "Argumentative Indian", and Stephen Trimble's anthology "Words From the Land: Encounters With Natural History Writing" to the Griffiths book. The latter book is foundational in my reading life; I discovered it in a rarely trafficked section of the Georgia Tech library in the summer of 2001, and it opened up whole worlds of writers to me, starting with one of my most favorite writers now, Wendell Berry, and extending all the way to Annie Dillard, John McPhee, Edward Abbey, Peter Matthiessen etc. After debating for a while if I should buy Richard Feynman's (one of my heroes) collected letters, and resisting the lure of crowding my garret further with paper that would likely sit unread, I headed out to the tunnels across the Hudson.

When I landed, I was greeted by a crescent moon, and a breeze flowing through the new foliage of the oak trees in the neighborhood park one has to walk through to get to my slum lair.

Include(-d) completing reading Barry Lopez's collection of writings in the anthology "Vintage Barry Lopez", riding New York City subways filled with various tribes such as that one whose ears come filled with two little white capsules, and attached hanging wires, or this one whose females always wear face paint and shimmery dresses, and seem to have an unsteady gait, all the while reflecting on my own shorted interactions with the natural world, subsequent to my migration to this urban ecosystem by the sea, all in the light of Lopez's lucid essays. For example, when Lopez in his opening essay, "Landscape and Narrative" writes:

" I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution. If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of the sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out, and in that tangible evidence you will sense a history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush-the resiliency of the twig under the bird, that precise shade of yellowish-green against the milk-blue sky, the fluttering whir of the arriving sparrow, are what I mean by “the landscape.” Draw on the smell of creosote bush, or clack stones together in the dry air. Feel how light is the desiccated dropping of the kangaroo rat. Study an animal track obscured by the wind. These are all elements of the land, and what makes the landscape comprehensible are the relationships between them. One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it-like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.

The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernible, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler's burst of song. That these relationships have purpose and order, however inscrutable they may seem to us, is a tenet of evolution. Similarly, the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as “mind” are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order; some of these are obvious, many impenetrably subtle. The shape and character of these relationships in a person's thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature-the intricate history of one's life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one's moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.

my mind attempts to come with the catalog of my recent encounters with the natural; such a catalog would be limited to

a) coveting pieces of driftwood in the tangle of plastic trash, beer bottles, even a lone bleached basketball, rope, shells etc beyond the high guardrail at a Jersey ferry, whose finger juts towards the southern tip of isle of Manhattan

b) picking sheaves of grass - of three kinds: witchgrass, Johnson grass (these two names I just discovered via this helpful pictorial guide - only quibble, I don't like calling them weeds), and wild barley - at edges of empty, but fenced in, lots in a Jersey ghetto to place in an empty pickle bottle; those greens gave me much pleasure even as they blended with the green shades of a geophysical map of these United States (gotten gratis from an old issue of the National Geographic) stuck on the only piece of free wall, which doesn't have a shelf of some kind placed against it. (That is one rotten sentence, and, perhaps, is a good reason why I need to limit myself to verse)

c) trying to remember the names of flowers and trees such as those those that I always carried home when I lived in Atlanta, that Southern city in a forest: azaleas, hibiscus, dogwood, red oak, bamboo, as I stroll around during these balmy spring nights in the little park that acts as the central square of the neighborhood I dwell in

That said, I was riding subways in the first place to take in free classical music. Last night it was New York Repertory Orchestra's competent performance of Borodin's steppe-like, i.e., expansive "Overture to 'Prince Igor'", Barber's brooding and intense "Violin Concerto" and Nielsen's take on four temperaments in his "Symphony No. 2" (I like the melancholia one best). Another good thing that I learned last night was that Borodin wasn't a trained composer etc but instead just happened to be a chemist with a doctorate who composed music at the highest level in his free time. Three cheers for all amateurs (including orchestras that perform for free in old, and catacomb-like, New York churches) and autodidacts I say!

Also tonight, I will be taking in three of Brahms's sonatas for violin and piano. Subsequently, I will be scanning for Jay Griffiths's book "Wild" at a bookstore for this review makes me think I will like reading it. And this essay on what she calls "wild time" provide additional reasons for seeking this book out. A choice morsel from the essay, which sort of explains why I might be chafing against the non-boundaries of this free interval I have been granted after a couple of months of 80 hour working weeks:

"Traditionally, many indigenous peoples do not work for more than four hours a day. This fits with philosopher Bertrand Russell’s view that “there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous.” Aristotle said that “nature requires us not only to be able to work well but also to idle well.” But that’s hard for most of us."

Ayi! Does this mean I need to relearn how to be a slacker?!

if my management visits me anytime soon?