Above: front page of the Telegraph, an Indian daily newspaper, on January 24. Posted below is the verbatim text of the speech I gave at the convocation of the Indian Statistical Institure on January 23, 2020. It differs from the text in the pamphlet distributed at the event at a few places. One is the … Continue reading
mons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63818412 This is the draft of a letter to Susan Sontag that I just found in my notebook from July 1988. I remember well attending the Summer workshops of the Writers Institute at Skidmore College in 1988, I believe being in Steve Millhauser’s class. Susan Sontag was one of the invited writers on the … Continue reading
Walther von der Vogelweide, a 12th century Minnesaenger, is regarded as one of the greatest German poets next to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I ran into his poems recently on the internet. One of them gave me the chills since it so much resonates with my own feeling nowadays. I’m reproducing here the … Continue reading
. “The literal meaning word Mandala means circle, and circle mandalas are also one of the most commonly available form of mandalas. … Ancient Hindu scriptures depict mandalas as a period of creativity, of powerful existence, and a symbol of deeper connection with the self and the universe at large.” I have been on the … Continue reading
. Aan Zee is a novel I started writing at the beginning of the 1980s. Actually I wrote a short story, and brought it in to be critiqued by William Kennedy when I took his fiction writing class in 1983. Kennedy encouraged me to expand the story into a novel. So it grew over time, … Continue reading
On October 4, 2019 I donated an archive of material associated with Workspace to SUNY Library’s Special collection. With the donation I hope that through open access, the unique period of wild, creative arts performance activities in the sleeping Albany, NY of the 70s and beginning of the 80s will be some day fully … Continue reading
We bought the iron dragon from Paolo in Casole, near Siena, Italy. Paolo is a marvelously gifted artist who works with wood, metal, you name it. Casole is a lively town filled with many art objects. One of Paolo’s giant sculptures graces the square before City Hall. The dragon is actually a chimera, half dragon, … Continue reading
Problems of archiving are being “solved” because you can ship your pictures and movies to “the Cloud.” What precisely is “the Cloud”? It’s a vast network of servers that are spinning continuously somewhere in farms, each consuming the same amount of electricity as a whole town. Why should we worry? “The Cloud” has become the … Continue reading
When the redacted Mueller report came out, there was a singular page (page 18) that was all black, except for the fact that it contained the unredacted word “troll”. This seemed an unlikely word to escape Barr’s busy pen, but none of the Attorney General’s actions made any sense, so the rationale for passing the … Continue reading
I was for the first time in Buenos Aires, home of Borges and his world of infinite mirrors. Reading a book on Borges on the plane, I discovered that among all his invented characters he may have picked from the world map, there is a Julia von Weidenau. Weidenau/Sieg (later gobbled up and denigrated to … Continue reading
. . This has been the fruit of 15 minutes spent with my camera in front of the Jubilee Supermarket, “The Friendliest Supermarket in the Neigborhood.” I stopped taking pictures not because I ran out of material, but because my fingers turned to ice.
Cenotes (sinkholes) form a halfring on the Ycatan peninsual with a radius of 50 km, around a point that marks the impact of the large meteoroid that wiped out much of life, including the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The crater created by the impact, which is called Chicxulub, has a diameter of 180 km. … Continue reading
. Ever since I was a teenager I wanted to build a fountain. The fountain was the grand idea of reconciling nature with human engineering, my little Versailles if you will. I never got beyond the concept, as I’ve noted in a earlier blog, but, as close as I got to describing how I wanted … Continue reading
Just after passing the dog run on 72nd street there is the underpass under the Hudson parkway. It’s a depressing place, with puddles and acoustics that make you want to run and get out of it as quickly as possible on the other side. Think of my surprise to see the outline of a heart, … Continue reading
. I was in Sydney recently, at the International Conference on Electron Microscopy, and reunited with a friend whom I met in 1974 when I attended an early precursor of that conference in Canberra. At that time he took me to places with his car, to the bush and to an event at the university … Continue reading
. All blossoms along the River-walk are gone. I experience the world in Gleichnissen, in similes, in metaphors. The strongest metaphor is the image of death. Every plant, every flower is animated by my identification with them. I die a thousand deaths seeing flowers wither. As I expressed it to a person dear to me: … Continue reading
. The word play (if this the right word in the grisly context) between remembering and dismembering propelled my today to post a tweed on Twitter about Donald Trump’s denial of the complicity of his Saudi buddies in the heinous crime committed in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey two weeks ago. [Trump, I hasten to … Continue reading
. The test has established unequivocally that the subject is in fact an object. The absence of blood, the interior scaffolding — all clues point to an elaborate hoax. Life-like or not, we fail to feel sympathy for a contraption ostensibly made of plaster. .
. . The first Ancient Telescope that I discovered, depicted at the bottom, exists on the beach of the Olympic Peninsula. I reported its discovery years ago in COWBIRD (the social media platform that closed on March 31, 2017, but is still accessible). This wooden Telescope will have weathered a bit more, and the part … Continue reading
. . I recently visited Horst Schmidt-Boecking, one of my high school classmates, in Frankfurt. Until his government-mandated retirement he was Professor of the Physics Department of Frankfurt’s university, aptly named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In his house was an oil panting my uncle did, Hermann Manskopf. My uncle’s fame as a painter did … Continue reading
