03.31.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:34 pm by Miracle ♪♫
Title: Pianistic Impressions
Artist: Miracle Romano
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Year: 2006
.
.
.
How Oft When Thou, My Music, Music Play’st
~ William Shakespeare ~
How oft when thou, my music, music play’st,
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap,
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips which should that harvest reap,
At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more bless’d than living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.
.
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
03.30.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 7:19 pm by Miracle ♪♫
After learning about Grass’ past involvement with the Waffen-SS, I was reluctant to read any of his works even though The Tin Drum continues to be hailed as anti-Nazi. Nevertheless, after reading The Flounder, I realized that I would have missed an exceptional piece of literature had I ignored the urges of a certain Günter Grass fan.
Imagine history written poetically with the abiding erudition of the great German authors, the wondrous language and imagination of Umberto Eco, and the philosophical and double-entendric humor of Tom Robbins. The result would come rather close to The Flounder by Günter Grass.
Not only is it a satire about the relationships and roles of men and women throughout the ages, but it is also a subtle satire of civilization and world history, from the stone ages to the present. Pun intended, one can surely say that it’s a book for all ages. A mighty thick book, but highly entertaining while every page abounds with eloquence and significance.
Some people ask me about requirements when reading a particularly thick book. I only answer such questions with a smile, but besides time, I would have to say that for The Flounder, it would have to be a sense of humour. Other than being a book for all ages, it is also a book for everyone: A chef will enjoy this book just as much as a philosopher would – as long as both have a knack for humour. Without humour, The Flounder might be forced to remain nonsensical and even obscene.
.
“Where, when the ear is covered or committed to other images,
do crumbs of laughter nestle?”
¤ ¤ ¤
One more thing, don’t read it during recital month and when you’re trying not to take reading religiously! I did, and this resulted in a series of interruptions and withdrawal symptoms. =P
¤ ¤ ¤
Günter Grass triumphed over John Fowles in the 1999 Nobel nominations, and as one may have already noticed, I am reading my way through a Nobel marathon. This way, I’ll be absorbing diverse but lauded literary characteristics.The experience is proving to be surprising and exciting. It is almost like traveling. Even though one cannot compare the actual adventure to life behind book covers, it is still a grand substitute while you cannot be anywhere else but home.
.
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
03.25.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:11 pm by Miracle ♪♫
Title: Con Passione
Artist: Miracle Romano
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Year: 2009
.
.
The Cellist
~ Galway Kinnell ~
At intermission I find her backstage
still practicing the piece coming up next.
She calls it the “solo in high dreary.”
Her bow niggles at the string like a hand
stroking skin it never wanted to touch.
Probably under her scorn she is sick
that she can’t do better by it. As I am,
at the dreary in me, such as the disparity
between all the tenderness I’ve received
and the amount I’ve given, and the way
I used to shrug off the imbalance
simply as how things are, as if the male
were constituted like those coffeemakers
that produce less black bitter than the quantity
of sweet clear you poured in–forgetting about
how much I spilled through unsteady walking,
and that lot I threw on the ground
in suspicion, and for fear I wasn’t worthy,
and all I poured out for reasons I don’t understand yet.
“Break a leg!” somebody tells her.
Back in my seat, I can see she is nervous
when she comes out; her hand shakes as she
re-dog-ears the top corners of the big pages
that look about to flop over on their own.
Now she raises the bow–its flat bundle of hair
harvested from the rear ends of horses–like a whetted
scimitar she is about to draw across a throat,
and attacks. In a back alley a cat opens
her pink-ceilinged mouth, gets netted
in full yowl, clubbed, bagged, bicycled off, haggled open,
gutted, the gut squeezed down to its highest pitch,
washed, sliced into cello strings, which bring
an ancient screaming into this duet of hair and gut.
Now she is flying–tossing back the goblets
of Saint-Amour standing empty,
half-empty, or full on the tablecloth-
like sheet music. Her knees tighten
and loosen around the big-hipped creature
wailing and groaning between them
as if in elemental amplexus.
The music seems to rise from the crater left
when heaven was torn up and taken off the earth;
more likely it comes up through her priest’s dress,
up from that clump of hair which by now
may be so wet with its waters, like the waters
the fishes multiplied in at Galilee, that
each wick draws a portion all the way out
to its tip and fattens a droplet on the bush
of half notes now glittering in that dark.
At last she lifts off the bow and sits back.
Her face shines with the unselfconsciousness of a cat
screaming at night and the teary radiance of one
who gives everything no matter what has been given.
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
03.20.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 9:11 am by Miracle ♪♫
Elizabeth Costello is the first book I’ve read from 2003’s Nobel Laureate for Literature, J.M. Coetzee, whose cultivation as an artist springs from a unique South African and Australian background. So much can be said of this book, but maintaining the informal manner of my pseudo-book reviews, I will be more personal and leave out most of the information that is readily available to us by way of Google.
Do not let the seemingly namby-pamby title fool you. It is a complicated novel that will not fall in the enjoyable category, but would pass as rare and remarkable.The chapters in the table of contents present themselves as “lessons”, and this label is deserved since the novel consists mostly of lectures (which Coetzee delivered prior to this book’s publication) that are successfully interlaced along the fictional life of Elizabeth Costello, an aging and accomplished writer who is in the last and difficult chapters of her life. While most people find the novel’s gist in these ambiguous lectures, I found some of these perplexing and the words and thoughts outside the lectures more notable. The lead character being an award-winning novelist reflects on modes of narration, philosophies, and the writer’s life, but the passage that is imprinted in my mind until now, comes from her son, John: “But you must surely concede that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else. Otherwise we would all be speaking and writing private languages. It is not absurd - is it? - to concern oneself with what people have in common rather than with what sets them apart?”
Another surprising feature of Elizabeth Costello is how the sensual paragraphs advance unexpectedly like a furtive animal. I did not admire these segments but I am amazed at how they were constructed into the novel. Coetzee is an impressive author who presents storytelling adeptly and extraordinarily, and if I did not view stars as a very ridiculous way to evaluate books, Elizabeth Costello would be bequeathed five stars for technique, but only two and a half stars for its sentiments, I’m afraid - from my humble perspective, at least.
“What does evil smell like? Sulphur? Brimstone? Zyklon B? Or has evil become colourless, and odourless, like so much of the rest of the moral world?”
.
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
03.19.09
Posted in 2009 Medley at 5:46 am by Miracle ♪♫
It is 2:30 a.m.
Nature beckons.
I am in the toilet.
Everything seems to be alright at first.
But then…
BLACKNESS.
I try to fight it.
“God, please help me.”
BLACKNESS.
I know what will happen next.
I recognize the feeling all too well.
I’ll collapse.
“I have to get cleaned up before I lose consciousness.”
I hear the flush.
I get up groggily.
I drink from the faucet.
BLACKNESS.
I wake up, slumped over the toilet bowl.
My face and legs hurt.
My underwear floats in the bowl.
I grope my way out.
BLACKNESS.
I wake up on all fours.
I crawl and knock on Dandi’s door.
BLACKNESS.
He carries me to my room.
.
.
That’s from someone who constantly insists that she would be fine on her own.
.
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
03.13.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:29 pm by Miracle ♪♫
…and there are times when being in an affectionate bond
feels like being impecunious neighboring lovers
too poor to sustain ever-afters,
who can only afford to steal glimpses
of each other across a clothesline, sharing fleeting glances
through holes on a tattered sleeve, or in between the inverted “V”
of hung worn-out jeans, and occasionally
through the leg-holes of sagging panties.
One can only wonder… is that sweetness, or poverty?
.
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
03.11.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 11:26 pm by Miracle ♪♫
“Men to the left! Women to the right!”
Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion.
Eight short, simple words.
Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother…
and I did not know that in that place, at that moment,
I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever.
At last, I’ve read the immortal and heart-wrenching book of him that hath said “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, might have escaped the holocaust but not its terrors, and in this personal record, he writes of the absolute evil that he has seen and experienced. It was tragic enough that what he went through made him lose his faith in humanity, what was even more tragic was that in his desperation as a young boy in an overwhelming situation, he was caused to lose his faith in God.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night…Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
François Mauriac (Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1952) who convinced Elie Wiesel to write this memoir remarks in the foreword that “for him [Wiesel], Nietzsche’s cry expressed an almost physical reality: God is dead.” Nevertheless, Mauriac concludes the foreword by saying, “All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. That is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.”
Night is a slender book, but one of horrifying intensity, and seldom did I turn a page without shedding tears first.
¤ ¤ ¤
Coincidentally, Dandi was able to download Defiance. I’m not a movie person but since I first learned of this film through Gabi, and a week after that Joshua Bell e-mailed me (alright, alright, not Joshua Bell himself… but the people behind his newsletter) announcing that the violin solos in the soundtrack are performed by him, my curiosity was piqued.
¤ ¤ ¤
There’s really nothing the world can do about the Holocaust anymore,
but to immortalize the stories, and remember, and to learn from them.
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
03.10.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 5:46 pm by Miracle ♪♫
Disquieting. It is beautifully written, but perturbing since it possibly hints on the borders of the blasphemous. Based on mythical religious figures, The Sybil of Delphi and The Wandering Jew, The Sybil orbits around the two characters’ encounters with different gods and their parallel calamitous fates.
Pär Lagerkvist’s elegiac style is a striking contrast to repulsive details and the perilous subject of divine and human relationships, hypocritical and real. Lagerkvist (1951’s Nobel Laureate in Literature) is clearly an outstanding author and while I may not approve of the views to which this book is inclined, I cannot help but profess that he asks penetrating questions and is thereby unjustified by the fifteen-peso tag adhered to the dusty back cover of The Sybil. (No one’s complaining, though…hehe…) There is an underlying and identifiable existential tone to this work, but like Hermann Hesse’s Demian, I cannot carelessly recommend it to anyone. I’m also beginning to notice a kinship between Jostein Gaarder and Pär Lagerkvist, so I am still willing to read further Lagerkvists and experience more of these highly intriguing Scandinavian authors.
“Myself? But who was that? Who was I?”
¤ ¤ ¤
…and yes, I did finish William Barrett’s Irrational Man. ‘Tis where my Stabilo’s life ceased. No other book has showed me the ropes the way it did for quite some time, and no other philosophy has grabbed me and appealed to me the way Existentialism does. Honestly, there was so much that was incomprehensible to me, but I am even more thankful for the much that I was led to understand, and the rather thorough introduction to philosophy and philosophers including another Scandinavian with a powerful pen.
¤ ¤ ¤
I’m sure my rushed condition is evident, but you must forgive me, because alas, my life cannot solely revolve in reading and blogging while listening to The Goldberg Variations even though I have to admit that sometimes, just sometimes, especially on warm afternoons like this when my students are absent, it does. *smiles to everyone*
¤ ¤ ¤
“…what does matter is what we make of existence.”
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
03.03.09
Posted in Lil Bro Talks at 6:28 pm by Miracle ♪♫
Chess is a homosexual game.
It’s where the bravest soldiers end up as queens.
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
03.01.09
Posted in 2009 Medley at 9:58 pm by Miracle ♪♫
Disjointed Additional Bits on Art
Before Irrational Man, I had a disdain for abstract visual art (excluding Picasso’s), because too many people have abused modern art and used it as an escape from their inability to paint or sculpt realistic proportions and thereby rely on seemingly profound explanations to convince others of their art. But at least I have now been taught and reminded that genuine abstract art also exists and why it exists.
¤ ¤ ¤
I think that nowadays, the difference between the mere artistic and the real artist has been lost or shrouded, but I have to contemplate more on this.
¤ ¤ ¤
The recent discussions on art brought to mind a funny incident from several years ago. There was a certain painting exhibit in Cebu where the artist hung his paintings on steel pipes in the middle of the room and therefore exposing both the front and back of his artworks. It did not turn out to be such a good idea since the room had opposing entrances and if people entered from one side, they would initially see the un-aesthetic backs of the framed artworks. Fortunately, I arrived through the favourable entrance and after circling the entire room, found out that the artist was pretty good except for his piteous framing job; visible staple wires, paint-stained plywoods, and untidily tucked canvasses thrived behind the pretty façade of the paintings. I tarried there and observed the other exhibit goers and noticed two men in their twenties come through the disadvantageous entrance. I expected them to react negatively to the artworks’ posterior but no, they suddenly went into this deep discussion about abstract art. One of them even pointed to a certain painting’s rear and seemed to philosophize about what he saw. Curious, I peeked through their huddled bodies and lo and behold! I saw a streak of paint and they were trying to explain it! But ladies and gentlemen, this very abstract art that they were so intent in construing was merely an accidental streak of paint smeared on one of the pieces of plywood that the artist chose to mount his canvas on. The real painting was on the other side, and these two men did not know it.
(Perfect story line for an “AbsurDom” entry, huh?)
¤ ¤ ¤
When I got back from Cebu a few days ago, I had a sudden urge to pick up the paintbrush after nearly a year of a visual art caesura. It was the first time since Maya that I felt inspired to paint, but even as the color of my thoughts appeared on the canvas and every brush stroke felt exhilarating, I realized that I still cannot claim to be an artist. I look at Papa and know that he is the real artist and it would take perhaps a lifetime or two to become like him, and yet he barely talks about art. I feel like those two men.
.
Permalink
