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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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Sunday
Mar152009

Delightful dangerous literature - 2666

Greetings,

Draw, paint, sing, dance, write, disappear.

Tell me a secret, poet. Reveal your wandering verse, your free form exile. There is no salvation.

Not too detached. Not too sentimental. We are surrounded by androids. Give the zombies simple stuff. Let them wrap their minds around artificial entertainment instruments in their operating rooms. Cut them open.

How do we measure their emotional receptivity? How do they establish meaning inside the daily, brutal violence?

Rolling and tumbling. A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned. People take themselves way too serious. The art and elements of a Japanese folding screen - shapes, edges, designs, natural free form.

Tell me why you loved being a campground guard in Costa Brava, Spain. Was it the night, the dark? The ghosts from your childhood? Yes, I imagine it was all the ghost children, all the dead women in Ciudad Juarez. All the unclaimed corpses.  All the young girls. Never identified. Never claimed. Forgotten forever.

How you turned to writing fiction to support your family, your children. How you said you would have rather been a detective instead of a writer. How they are related. How you realized your literary life in Spain after Chile, Mexico and lost highways along your way. Wandering. Literature, the abyss.

You created a new novel form before passing on. Thank you. 2666.

Creating literature is a dangerous occupation. Silence, exile and cunning.

Metta.

 

Friday
Mar132009

A Tomato Based Culture

Greetings,

From Fujian, China to Ankara, Turkey (a kind of fowl) to Bursa along the Silk Road with Doner and Pide, all the sliced and diced tomatoes, all the bamboo baggage filled with laughter and forgetting inside the smashing of utensils and wash and wear drip dry neon holiday flashing factories along metro subway tracks where world weary

pedestrians completing a simple sentence with a full plate of delicious shoppers dancing inside fire breathing ovens stoking love's fires before racing home to mother, father, sister, brother all wearing traditional anxiety values around heavily medicated ma-scared necks handing someone change, your fragile receipt for paying

at the cosmic bowling alley for strikes and spares and did you know the great father liberator has a train car parked forever at the main station, a gift from Adolph, the Further and it was all imaginary, this T place where idle men stood around looking bored and unemployed, uneducated drinking brown tea

after artfully massaging a microscopic silver spoon around the rim, deep into the universe of sugar stars clanging metal against a small glass destroying cubes manufactured in a filthy factory - so an inspection engineer whispered in her strict confidence - don't use the sugar she whispered across a plate of pasta on a chilly Ankara night before they went to a wedding in Ulus, the ancient Roman village, deep in an underground cavern filled with musicians, dancers, and children

gypsies played anvils

far away from shy lovers holding hands under the table inside the rising sun of their desire, their passion for yawning bamboo chairs where two elderly women in multi-hued headscarves smoked exploding drops of water from plummeting icicles onto tiled roofs above the cafe where a ghost scribbled in shadows burning his fingers to see the why eye and the falling water drops were music to his ears

Metta.

Monday
Mar092009

Synecdoche

Greetings,

A prospective home owner walks into a house with a real estate agent. There are numerous small fires burning.

"I really like this house," she says. "But I'm really concerned about dying in a fire."

"Yes," says the agent, "It's a big decision, how one chooses to die."

Synecdoche, a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman concerns life, choices, dreams, art, relationships and death.

Always making choices.

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Weist, Deirdre O'Connell.

Give a man a match and he's warm for a minute. Set him on fire and he's alive for the rest of his life.

Read more...

Metta.

 

Saturday
Mar072009

A Voice

Greetings,

Once upon a time there was a voice. It was connected to you and others through electrons, neutrons, atoms and spinning space particles.

It admired a black and green dragonfly closely. The dragonfly was not afraid. It knew the difference between a piano and a clarinet. 

There were some children in the audio adventure. They assembled kites and ran on a green field feeling the ground below them. Their kites caught a breeze and lifted off. The children flew high and far, far away.

Middle Kingdom podcast #66 shares this wonderful little secret: "Much learning does not teach wisdom."

Metta.

Friday
Mar062009

Chimayo

Its been years since
I’ve thought of you
it occured now
just when I
smoothed out Two Gray Hills
wool carpet

lured into red sunsets
splitting pure white
dazzling yellow light
from the center
remembering cold january mornings
weaving our way past snow lined adobe

gathering blessed sand, 

red chillis

seeing Navajo weave their magic

we purchased magic
rolled it into our passion
ate our dreams
carried it on our journey
toward separation

weft, woof, fibers glistening
sage induced fires
curling new mexico stars
pressing surface of our desires
smoothing out Chimayo
breathing shuttles click clack
memory sizzors escape their way
toward you screaming on fifth floor
suicide watch time