The Tale of Genji - pg. 60

"I would not be known for flitting lightheartedly to every flower
but this bluebell this morning I would be sad not to pick.

What do you suggest?" he said, taking her hand; but she replied with practised wit,

"Your haste to be off before morning mists are gone makes it all to plain,
so I should say, that your heart cares little for your flower,"

Genesis

I

Against the burly air I strode

Crying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bear

Upon the dead weight of the land;

And the waves flourished at my prayer,

The rivers spawned their sand,

And where the streams were salt and full

The tough pig-headed salmon strove,

Ramming the ebb, in the tide's pull,

to reach the steady hills above.

II

The second day I stood and saw

The osprey plunge with triggered claw,

Feathering blood along the shore,

To lay the living sinew bare.

And the third day I cried: 'Beware

The soft-voiced owl, the ferret's smile,

The hawk's deliberate stoop in air,

Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel

Forever bent upon the kill.'

III

And I renounced, on the fourth day,

This fierce and unregenerate clay,

Building as a huge myth for man,

The watery Leviathan,

And made the long-winged albatross

Scour the ashes of the sea

Where Capricorn and Zero cross,

A brooding immortality --

Such as the charmed phoenix has

In the unwithering tree.

IV

The phoenix burns as cold as frost;

And, like a legendary ghost,

The phantom-bird goes wild and lost,

Upon a pointless ocean tossed.

So, the fifth day, I turned again

To flesh and blood and the blood's pain.

V

On the sixth day, as I rode

In haste about the works of God,

With spurs I plucked the horse's blood.

By blood, we live, the hot, and cold,

To ravage and redeem the world:

There is no bloodless myth will hold.

And by Christ's blood are men made free

Though in close shrouds their bodies lie

Under the rough pelt of the sea;

Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight

The bones that cannot bear the light.

Savage Night At The Opera

books to buy

• The Trilogy
• In The Skin Of A Lion
• The Recognitions

Florida

The state with the prettiest name,

the state that floats in brackish water,

held together by mangrove roots

that bear while living oysters in clusters,

and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,

dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks

like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.

The state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white,

and unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale

every time in a tantrum.

Tanagers embarrassed by their flashiness,

and pelicans whose delight it is to clown;

who coast for fun on the strong tidal currents

in and out among the mangrove islands

and stand on the sand-bars drying their damp gold wings

on sun-lit evenings.

Enormous turtles, helpless and mild,

die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,

and their large white skulls, with round eye-sockets

twice the size of a man's.

The palm trees clatter in the stiff breeze

like the bills of the pelicans. The tropical rain comes down

to freshen the tide-looped strings of fading shells:

Job's Tear, the Chinese Alphabet. the scarce Junonia,

parti-colored pectins and Ladies' Ears,

arranged as on a gray rag rotted calico,

the buried Indian Princessis skirt;

with these the monotonous, endless, sagging coastline

is delicately ornamented.

Thirty or more buzzards are drifting down, down, down,

over something they have spotted in the swamp,

in circles like stirred-up flakes of sediment

sinking through water.

Smoke from woods-fires filters fine blue solvents.

On stumps and dead tress the charting is like black velvet.

The mosquitoes

go hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.

After dark, the fireflies map the heavens in the marsh

until the moon rises.

Cold white, not bright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed,

and the careless, corrupt state is all black specks

too far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest

post-card of itself.

After dark, the pools seem to have slipped away.

The alligator, who has five distinct calls:

friendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning --

whimpers and speaks in the throat of Indian Princess.

Hindi Books

• Jhoota Sach - Yashpal
• Agra Bazar - Habib Tanvir

This Week

• Tale of Genji - 250pgs
• Persian lessons - 75
• First short exercise 24.01 - Phaedo
• Hayat-e-Javed

Destroyer : If you can't see my mirrors

If you can't see my mirrors
I see you coming around, yeah
You're coming around

If you can't see my mirrors
I see you coming around, yeah
You're coming around now

Pissed-up Sunday morning
We'll miss you in the show
Pissed-up Sunday morning
We'll miss you when you go
Go gently through the floor
A dismal and meaningless sigh

Pissed-up Sunday morning
We'll miss you when you go
Pissed-up Sunday morning
I'd kiss you, but you know
It'd be gently through the door
A dismal and meaningless sigh

Home from your eleventh tour
Honorable discharge aboard the HMS Pinafore
Oh what fun, oh what more

If you can't see my mirrors
If you can't see my mirrors
If you can't see my mirrors
If you can't see my mirrors

The Master and Margarita - Closing

The next morning he wakes up silently but perfectly calm and well. His needled memory grows quiet, and until the next full moon no one will trouble the professor -- neither the noseless killer of Gestas, not the cruel fifth prosecutor of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate.

[1928-1940]

The Master and Margarita - pg. 383

'And there, too,' Woland pointed behind them, 'what are you going to do in the little basement?' Here the sun broken up in the glass went out. 'Why?' Woland went on persuasively and gently, 'oh, thrice-romantic master, can it be that you don't want to go strolling with your friend in the daytime under cherry trees just coming into bloom, and in the evening listen to Schubert's music? Can it be that you don't want to sit over a retort like Faust, in hopes that you'll succeed in forming a new homunculus? There! There! The house and the old servant are already waiting for you, the candles are already burning, and soon they will go out, because you will immediately meet the dawn. Down this path, master, this one! Farewell! It's time for me to go!'

The Master and Margarita - pg. 371

'Oh, for pity's sake,' replied Azazello, 'is it you I hear talking? Your friend calls you a master, you can think, so how can you be dead? Is it necessary, in order to consider yourself alive, to sit in a basement and dress yourself in a shirt and hospital drawers? It's ridiculous!...'

Books for the remainder of this week

• Persian Lesson 60
• Genji: pg. 100
• Forum

The Master and Margarita - pg. 187

A tenner. I give him three roubles change. He leaves. I go to my wallet, there's a bee there -- zap in the finger! Ah, you! ...' and again the driver pasted on some unprintable words. 'And no tenner. Yesterday, in the Variety here' (unprintable words), 'some vermin of a conjurer did a seance with then-rouble bills' (unprintable words) ...

The Master and Margarita - pg. 74

The poet had wasted his night while others were feasting and now understood that it was impossible to get it back. One needed only to raise one's head from the lamp to the sky to understand that the night was irretrievably lost. Waiters were hurriedly tearing the tablecloths from the tables. The cats slinking around the veranda had a morning look. Day irresistibly heaved itself upon the poet.

The Master and Margarita - pg. 53

In the exact spot where the pile of clothes had been, a pair of striped drawers, the torn Tolstoy blouse, the candle, the icon and a box of matches had been left. After threatening someone in the distance with his fist in powerless anger, Ivan put on what was left for him.

The Master and Margarita - pg. 51

In the huge, extremely neglected front hall, weakly lit by a tiny carbon arc lamp under the high ceiling, black with grime, a bicycle without tyres hung on the wall, a huge iron-bound trunk stood, and on a shelf over the coat rack a winter hat lay, its long ear-flaps hanging down. Behind one of the doors, a resonant male voice was angrily shouting something in verse from a radio set.

The Master and Margarita - pg. 42

The sky over Moscow seemed to lose colour, and the full moon could be seen quite distinctly high above, not yet golden but white. It was much easier to breathe, and the voices under the lindens now sounded softer, eveningish.

The Tale Of Genji - Opening

1
KIRITSUBO
The Paulownia Pavilion

In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Majesty's Consorts and Intimates enjoyed exceptional favor. Those others who had always assumed that pride of place was properly theirs despised her as a dreadful woman, while the lesser Intimates were unhappier still.

For Susan

First published in the Unites States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2001
Published in Penguin Books 2003

Translation, introduction, and notes copyright Royall Tyler, 2001
All rights reserved.
Illustrations on pp. 5--1107 reproduced by permission of the artist and original publisher.
Copyright Minoru Sugai and Shogakukan Publishing Company.

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Weiss
Designed by Jay Zimet

Destroyer: European Oils

I went for you in military times and, then, I waited well into the 2300s.
I made my way through the Union Street design kids.
They were alright.
They were on fire.
They harbored an elementary desire to do good works.
I bought 'em all, I bought 'em all!
I made donations to The Plague, and The Fall and The Old Grey Mare in her stall!

Endangered Ape, a couple years in Solitary never really hurt anyone.
Distinguished colleagues, dead music-writers' brides - I apologize.
They were alright.
They were on fire.
They harbored an elementary desire to do good works.
I bought 'em all, I bought 'em all!
I made donations to The Plague, and The Fall and The Old Grey Mare in her stall.

I don't know, I guess I'm doing alright.
Tabitha takes another stab at becoming light.
She never wants to go.
Always want to stay illuminated.

Ride towards the dawn, Quicksilver on the side of nothing.
Never had a chance.
Never had to choose Your Blood versus Your Blues.

Book Cycle: December

1. Plato: Forum
2. Enquiries Into Human Understanding, Principles of Morals
3. Treatises
4. Hayat-e-Javed
5. Tale Of Genji
6. Ingeborg Bachmann (2010, rest of,)
7. Muslim Women in India
8. Odysseus Elytis

Master and Margarita - pg. 36

'Oh, no!' Pilate exclaimed, and he felt lighter and lighter with every word: there was no more need to pretend, no more need to choose his words. 'You have complained about me too much to Caesar, and now my hour has come, Kaifa! Now the message will fly from me, and not to the governor in Antioch, and not to Rome, but directly to Capreae, to the emperor himself, the message of how you in Yershalaim are sheltering known criminals from death. And then it will not be water from Solomon's Pool that I give Yershalaim to drink, as I wanted to do for your own good! No, not water! Remember how on account of you I had to remove the shields with the emperor's insignia from the walls, had to transfer troops, had, as you see, to come in person to look into what goes on with you here! Remember my words: it is not just one cohort that you will see here in Yershalaim, High Priest -- no! The whole Fulminata legion will come under the city walls, the Arabian cavalry will arrive, and then you will hear bitter weeping and wailing! You will remember Bar-Rabban then, whom you saved, and you will regret having sent to his death a philosopher with his peaceful preaching!'