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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Friday
Jan152016

immediate direct

Curious beginnings determine her artistic sense of form, coloring stories of her village.

Cutting. Planting. Harvesting.

Complete slow rhythm of life. Her skill radiates every new expression. Her heart sings.

Her simple, immediate direct feeling experience.

Art enables her this Beauty.

She describes what she draws.

Her words fly through forests with resplendent peacocks, birds of paradise.

A blind conversation developed a through line.

Turn a blind eye.

Blind heard muted laughter before intuition gestured pink floating word worlds.

Laughter danced with exhaled attachment.

Wednesday
Jan132016

mask eats face

He broke down.

He returned to the bamboo shock shacks in deep rutted fields. Under cover. She wasn't there. Massage love called a sprite of 25 wearing flower ring on her finger. Silver with seven petals. Open. Consternation in his weak heart. He felt the sense of loss. Accept loss forever.

This symbol, how it transformed men's eyes into want.

This silent metallic flower only now, under a weak light as mama smiled through her destined crooked teeth, saying, Money.

Ling's 25-year young friend is beautiful, they all are, in an immature, petulant way.

Lack of confidence met betrayal.

Betrayal knew the stranger desired L.

The sensitivity of seeing the future with Awareness - Attention – Non-attachment.

Transference - emotions - an instinctual way of living objectively.

POWER

Masks - good or (d)evil?

           - money or sex

           - relationships

           - life and death

           - beauty and truth

The mask eats the face. 

Maybe, she said, being a Player. Lying in her Ling heart. No intention. Intention is karma.

She got what she needed. Money. Traded her passion for cash. You can't put passion in the bank. You can't eat passion, it eats you. Grasping is suffering.

Solvent with clear heart. Heart had nothing to do with passion. Passion sang its joy describing her minor character.

The 3-act play ran five weeks in Luang Prabang.

On opening night her love opened like a flower. It rained flowers over a lonely man.

Mutual needs were satisfied.

Intuition augured well, laughing.

It's difficult to take any of this seriously.

Posture. Breath.

Plant heliotropes. Night aroma in gardens. 

Monday
Jan112016

invisible bird lament

He decided to end it. Ling was too expensive. Her heart was good yet money/greed was her basic underlying motivation. He'd been contributing to her welfare for five weeks.

"Money for mama and papa. Money for my friends. Money for the festival. Money for my motorcycle. Money for my son. Milk money."

He’s a soft touch.

They shared their desires, lust, loneliness, curled up together in the dark night of the soul as wild cats howled before a invisible tropical bird sang its long lament at dawn.

Yes, he'd had enough playing this rescuing role.

If you pay you owe.

He ended it on Valentines Day. Break my heart.

There was no emotional attachment to the sight.

It was an unpleasant fact.

Moleskine sketch #1

Thursday
Jan072016

The Madman - Kahlil Gibran

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen, — the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, — I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

- Kahlil Gibran

Wednesday
Jan062016

Not True

interrupted Omar’s suicidal literary agent speaking through voice snail. It’s impossibly probable.

You make your own truth from embroidered lies.

I know everything and can say nothing about beginnings, arc, tension or sustaining a plot. Something has to happen to move it along with narrative flow, character development and action. Make me cry. Give me emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist.

Grab me by the throat in the first clear short sentence. Make me pay attention. Give me a sharp emotional marketing hook hanging above a mainstream marketing platform in cheap plywood Asian brothels where evil greedy men with POWER threaten and violently abuse orphaned sex slave girls. Where they buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, season them for five years in rooms, use them, abuse them and discard them on the mean old street.

They are commodities like rice. Rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop. Open my legs. Plow the fertile soil between my legs. Open my feeble, nonchalant and passive innocent broken heart-mind. Throw in some Asian culture like Chinese opera, gamelan music, 3-act dramas, ballet, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and dancing Apsara dancers on 8th century laterite Angkor Wat ruins being strangled by cotton wood roots.

Show me how superstitious evil men believe fucking a virgin gives them super strength enabling them to leap over tall virgins with a single organismic shudder. Give me a small organic boom-boom death in eight seconds. Just get to the verb.

“Ok, said Rita, an orphan in Cambodia and independent writer/publisher of Ice Girl in Banlung. “Unpleasant facts are littered through this work like lovers, countries, butterflies, natural phenomena, rice and hot sex.

“Cambodians have been screwed by history, war, violence and predatory politicians. Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and rising) of Cambodia has been sold to China. They’ve invested $16.9 billion. They bought the government.

“1,7,000,000 million out of 11m were massacred by human genocide animals. 40% of our land is filled with unexploded ordinance. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce only what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around. Milling around is an art form. Khmer are soft and kind. They have a good heart. They are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. They drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the speed and grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera. The trick is to tolerate bland empty eyed star gazing starrers and hustlers with Patience, your great teacher.

“Bored after five minutes they lose interest. Bye-bye butterfly. Let’s pretend to be exactly who we are. The Great Pretenders. Be careful who you pretend to be.”

“Thank you Rita. Whew, what a mouthful,” said the blind literary agent.

“Yeah,” said Rita. I spill sounds and smell metaphors. The human condition reads history and weeps. Create memory, a form of history, re-write history.          

“Your memory is the world, and the world is a village,” said the nerve agent. “Cry me a river. Build me a bridge. Get over it.”

“I will, will you?” said Rita.

“I have a question for Lucky.”

“He’s here.”

“What do you recall during the one-hour full body massage with blind Flower at Seeming Hands?”

”Her hands were all,” I said. “Her hands were water, air, earth and fire. Soft gentle sensations. Sensing, feeling her physical sense. Engaging all her senses. Touch is her essence. She knew my body, all the pressure points.”

“Soft, medium or hard?” Flower asked.

“During her therapeutic touch and go I considered this vignette. How I was looking for ideas and structure and formless form and literary vulgarity. I slowed down inside the labyrinth. A writer is a dwarf, invisible and must survive.”

Flower whispered, “I don’t like sleeping alone. It’s fucking boring.”

It’s easy to remember loving Flower’s soft, deep real tactile sensations. She knew how to please a stranger’s skin. She lived in the middle way. Her middle way is breathing, and awareness. Her middle way is acceptance and loving kindness. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude. Non-attachment. Flower is the essence between detachment and sentimentality.

“Eat the world with your blind eyes,” she whispered.         

“Yes my Flower, yes.”

“Dead or blind, there’s no difference,” Flower said.

“People who cause you difficulties, you should think of them as very valuable teachers because they provide you with the opportunity to develop patience.”