A grid system in four parts: site, threshold, damage, and a shaky content that's subject to change. Or: a way of holding things in one place long enough to understand what's happening. Narrative. Then it rains. It rains for three days straight, and the city disappears. Then you disappear. I am thinking of the night you opened the door of your house and threw the book into the garden. Dark garden. An intermediary text, architecture is not for babies. Architecture is not for the house, but what surrounds it. If the grid gets wet, then you just slide off it, into the rain. This is an act of repetition made possible by the structure, but only when the structure fails.
"Hey mister! If I'd of wanted architecture, I'd of asked for architecture." "It's architecture 1, dummy." "Who you calling dummy?" "You, dummy." "Don't call me dummy. Architecture 1, my ass." "I love it when you talk dirty." "Oh shut up, do you want me to come over there and..." "Oh shut your pie-hole. This ain't a donut shop, in case you hadn't noticed." "No, I hadn't, actually."
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 29, 2008
A tropical modern building with an elevator. The name of a club in Brixton. A definition of narrative that resists complicated responses, because it's so fucking cool.
"What did you do on Saturday night?" "Oh, nothing much. Chucked back a few Malibu and Oranges, and all that." "Where did you go?" "Architecture 5." "Dude, that's really weird. That's where I went too." "No." "Yes!" "Shut up!" "No, seriously. I met this amazing, amazing guy. His name is Scott and when it was time to go, I heard this voice in my head, and it said, you have just met your future husband." "What, like a voice inside you or something you actually heard?" "I don't know." "Wow." "Yeah." "But, I think you should take it easy. You've been through a lot lately." "I know, but...he was really cute." "Define cute." "I don't know." "You're a little bit stupid, aren't you?" "What?" "Oh, I was just asking Terry where the olives were." "How is Terry, anyway?" "Terry! Terry, how are you?" "Fine." "He says he's fine."
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist February 01, 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 03, 2007
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
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
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 remarkable event of one's heart breaking at the exact instant that someone offers you a vial of their blood.
Rochester, NY: February 1994. Though chunks of ice were falling from the sky, he bicycled to Tops supermarket to get me, then a menstruating woman in her mid-twenties, the Sunday New York Times and a bloody steak. Now that's true love. Except, of course, it wasn't. Sometimes I think that love isn't something located in a particular person, like a husband, but, rather, something that's passed from person to person, like an albino rabbit at the petting zoo in Oklahoma City. But where is Oklahoma? This is the problem with not knowing how to position yourself appropriately in a restricted space. Though I'm now an American, I was born in a country where even the children drank tea for breakfast, like pirates in need of root canal surgery. Where were you born? Do you love someone? Describe your favorite lover of all time. My lovers have had the following occupations: bike mechanic, waiter, wedding video maker, performer in a miracle play, rabbi, merchant banker, poet (though I don't think they earned any money), professor, and...I think that's it. No. Art critic. Electrical engineer. Peace corps volunteer. The son of the Chief of Police of Rajasthan. (I believe he received a stipend.)
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 18, 2008