this week i


listened to two lectures on western artists retreating to bali for ideas.  we discovered the garden of eden and did not want to be the serpents


attended the 2,401st psw meeting to watch leroy cronin discuss advances in laser-printing medicines

we need to invent the microphone to record and reproduce the field of chemistry

we can suddenly bring back off-patent drugs or orphaned drugs in small doses without a factory.  like abandoned books with the advent of e-readers


read the god of small things..

she was eighty-three.  her eyes spread like butter behind her thick glasses

even chacko had no really complete explanation for why the communist party was so much more successful in kerala than it had been almost anywhere else in india, except perhaps in bengal

they were forbidden from visiting his house, but they did.  they would sit with him for hours, on their haunches - hunched punctuation marks in a pool of wood shavings - and wonder how he always seemed to know what smooth shapes waited inside the wood for him.  they loved the way wood, in velutha's hands, seemed to soften and become as pliable as plasticine.  he was teaching them to use a planer.  his house (on a good day) smelled of fresh wood shavings and the sun.  of red fish curry with black tamarind.  the best fish curry, according to estha, in the whole world

the high delight of the airborne young

in the arrivals lounge, there were four life-sized cement kangaroos with cement pouches that said use me.  in their pouches, instead of cement joeys, they had cigarette stubs, used matchsticks, bottle-caps, peanut shells, crumpled paper cups and cockroaches.
red betel spit stains spattered their kangaroo stomachs like fresh wounds.
red-mouthed smiles the airport kangaroos had.
they looked as though if you pressed them they might say 'ma-ma' in empty battery voices

what esthappen and rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn't know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature's pursuit of ascendancy.  structure.  order.  complete monopoly.  it was human history, masquerading as god's purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience




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