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.

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

I had gotten back in touch with a girl (who once bore the burnt of my musings) earlier today, and she invited me to come out of my hotel-burrow to meet her and her husband. Given that I was cooped up all afternoon in my room, I had no idea that a mini snowfall was being brewed outside by the weather gods as I stepped out of the doors.

In the first instance, I was semi-leery of walking out into the steadily falling snow but when I returned to my room and put on my -20 C snow shoes expressly purchased for such weather conditions, I felt more confident as I wandered out into the windless snowfall. Few things I noticed or discovered as I was churning through the snow: the music of snow falling, the beauty of color white, the way other pedestrians loom in and out of the gray distances as if they were boats coming and leaving a harbor enveloped with mist.

Then as I got closer to my destination, the snow intensified, and I walked down a wrong street off Bloor, for a mile or so into a steady wind, which whipped snow off the street into the face, which obviosuly hurt like a bitch. And my glasses started getting crusted over with this white matter, and I realized I was pretty much random walking through snow drifts with a minor panic ringing in my ears.

I can now finally understand the Jack London-ish adage which roughly says it is not the cold which kills you as much as the panic that precedes it. At ths point, I took shelter into a helpfully placed public telephone booth and started Googling the address on my Blackberry. Of course by the time I got my bearings, my bare wet hands froze, and putting them back into the gloves involved these operations with the mouth.

Thankfully, I got to the meeting place without any further unintended detours, had some great beer and food with two very engaging conversationalists, always worth most snowy struggles, and walked back here, to my desk, on an absolutely still and snowbound Bloor Street. There is poetry in this but I don't have a muse tonight into whose ear I can whisper some of the fifty-two names (few which I looked up now: massak, mauja, qaniit) Eskimos have for snow*.

Goodnight.

* Even if this is a journalistic or a literary cliché, it is a lovely cliché.