15 definitions by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist
This is not caution. I am a university professor. It is not a particularly cautious act/behavior to write vaguely disgusting and diachronic definitions of angels, wolves and migration on a public dictionary site that anyone could read. I like writing my autobiography in the form of Urban Dictionary definitions. This is not, as I said, caution.
Writing intensely personal definitions of futurity, modernity, you name it, on a public dictionary site that you will have no access to once you press send. To do this without caution.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist July 20, 2012
Redness that's both linked and operative: mythologically unitary, but actually not contained. I refer you to the arteries and veins and also the valves which, on Miss Libby's echocardiogram, resembled baskets of kelp. Miss Libby is no longer with us. The heart fails. Perhaps it is better not to pick up with another human being. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and raspberry jam for breakfast? No. The heart is an open system. The heart is real. I don't want a boyfriend. I don't want another dog. I want red things: What moves my blood. Writing. I want the book to come.
What was the name of that French film? The one with Beatrice Dalle riding a dog sleigh at the end? I loved that shot where the girl's heart was lying next to her, wrapped in a T-shirt, throbbing in the snow. Did I really see that? I always like writing afterwards, but then I write something new. I wish I still had the soundtrack to Betty Blue.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 20, 2008
The humanimal is a hybrid of human and animal features, biological characteristics and/or behaviours.
The Wolf Children of Midnapure: feral children found living with wolves in Bengal, India, in 1920. Their eyes, for example, shone blue at night: an humanimal adaptation.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist August 21, 2006
A composite form that permits a larger discourse on the hybrid form. It's also a body that allows you to desire different things than you would do, normally. An invented construction, the humanimal is half you, half something else. Even an angel can be feral. I want a dark angel, and that is why I write books. That is why I expel the fur from the skin, so that the skinned body has a textured aura. If you touch it, it is yours. This is also a definition of capture. The humanimal is a fundamentally undomesticated or untrained figure.
Vladimir Nabakov, Brian Evenson, Rilke, Marguerite Duras, and so on. Their books all have humanimals in them. You can tell because faces aren't quite clear, which implies incaution -- in terms of the contact between characters. I am not interested in the narrator. I am not interested in the writer. I am interested in the figure that is made, deep in writing. In this sense, writing is the forest I walk out of, drenched in the smell of animals. I'm serious. Once, in Dharamsala, a monk ran past us on the steep stone stairs going down to McCleod Ganj. He yelled: "Lion!" And so we turned, and ran, too.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist December 3, 2007
Any day that has an airport, from which you text-message a person you once loved, and they write back, after 40 minutes: "Wow. Safe travels." And, feeling stupid, you stare out at the Manhattan skyline, observing how the Empire State Building is both absorbed into the silver gelatin sky and periodically released by it, when the gold light floods the sky just after dawn. Clouds. Newark. The feeling that you are about to get on a plane and travel in the opposite direction to what the heart wants. That kind of bittersweet melancholy and imperfect nutrition -- you've just ordered a fruit salad that seems to be fermenting in it's plastic tub -- constitutes the soft day with no misgivings, but a profound inability to think things through.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 15, 2008
The vertical axis of light, in the form of a hybrid being: half human, half bird. The act of opening your body to that light: that intensity is the angel too.
I dreamed of an owl-man and when I woke up, I tried to orient myself to him, geographically. I opened an atlas at random, thinking of the feral angel, and put my finger down. Where my finger landed, I went. I went to Colorado. There, in the color red, I tracked something and did not find it. It's too late now. This is what it's like to respond immediately to an angel. I don't recommend it unless you want your life to change forever in ways that unforseeable to you.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist December 3, 2007
A very, very amazing dog who was born in Waco, Texas, and who died in Loveland, Colorado. Fuzzy. Barked when people came to the door. Liked going to the cafe. Not sure why. Adored by neighbors and passers-by alike. Sometimes threw up, resulting in our discovery that beneath the scraggly beige carpet there were oak floors from the 1950s. What else? I am Indian, and thus genetically and culturally inured to the charms of domestic animals. Yet, I fell in love with this pooch.
Conversation with a neighbor:
Me: I don't know why, but I've been missing that Libster more than ever.
Annie: Wow, Cordell was just saying that he's been missing Miss Libby too.
Me: Miss Libby....
Annie: Best dog ever.
Me: Yeah.
Me: I don't know why, but I've been missing that Libster more than ever.
Annie: Wow, Cordell was just saying that he's been missing Miss Libby too.
Me: Miss Libby....
Annie: Best dog ever.
Me: Yeah.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 22, 2008