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September 01, 2005
Ondaatje
I need to read more Michael Ondaatje. Was it really that long ago that I journeyed to Danville, of all places, to hear a reading? He sounds just like how he writes: soft, lilting, lyrical, sensual... I remember asking him about the recurring images of plums in The English Patient.
In the 5th century B.C. graffiti poems were scratched onto the rock face of Sigiriya (Sri Lanka) --the rock fortress of a despot king. Short verses to the painted women in the frescoes which spoke of love in all its confusions and brokeness. Poems to mythological women who consumed and overcame mundane lives. The phrases saw breasts as perfect swans; eyes were long and clean as horizons. The anonymous poets returned again and again to the same metaphors.
When the government rounded up thousands of suspects during the insurgency of 1971, the Vidyalankara campus of the University of Ceylon was turned into a prison camp. The police weeded out the guilty, trying to break their spirit. When the university opened again the returning students found hundreds of poems written on walls, ceilings, and in hidden corners of the campus. quatrains and free verse about the struggle, tortures, the unbroken spirit, love of friends who had died for the cause. The students went around for days transcribing them into their notebooks before they were covered with whitewash and lye.
--excerpted from "Running in the Family" by Michael Ondaatje (pg 84-85)
Thanks to Keri Smith for this amazing excerpt from Running In the Family, a collection of Ondaatje's autobiographical essays.
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First Thursdays ...
...are always hectic.
Laugh out Loud @ Hang Art Gallery: David Fullarton, Josh Keyes, David Lippenberger, Mark Soderstrom and DAVe Warnke remind us that laughter is often the best response to a world that rarely makes sense.
HANG ART annex, 6-8pm
567 Sutter Street
SFlickr Meetup @ Crossroads Café: per usual, but this time for Burningman refusniks/ refugees.
Crossroads Café, 7pm to ?
599 Delancey St
CORO @ Fifty24SF: new works
Fifty24SF Gallery, 7-9:30pm
248 Fillmore St.
and last, but not least, the 5-and-a-half-year Fecalface Anniversary Party @ 111 Minna: 45 artists & several hundred friends celebrating the Fecal's 5th.
111 Minna, 5pm-2am
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