An entity who carries stories the way other entities carry bits of twig or children with big eyes or a carapace.. I cannot say the human being has a set of appendages or that he or she has language. It's not about that. It's not about movement. It's not about sounds that are held in the body. When I boil up a human being (which is horrible to think about, I'm sorry), I get: narrative. As the distinguishing trait.
I mean, she broke up with me, but she broke up with me in the morning. She was a real human being about it, you know? She spent the night.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 16, 2008
Sometimes I think that the whole reason I met him was to discover that his wife was studying Counseling Psychology, if indeed that is the name of something a person might actually learn, with the great-grand-niece of Frida Kahlo. In the narrative of desire, perhaps what matters is not intimacy but it's counterpart: a new thought. In this sense, the lover is a necessary force, but rarely it's limit. I said: "Maybe this is the reason we met." Thinking of the yellow table, the third eye, the monkey in her arms. Dominant. I begged for an introduction, forgetting for a moment who I was. To him. For her. A cunt. Do cunts get to meet Frida Kahlo? In the flesh? Greeley, Colorado is where the slaughterhouses are. I'd like to visit that university town.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 27, 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 03, 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 sordid and, obviously, pink creature of wierdly non-porcine origins, in A.A.Milne's "Winnie the Pooh." A baby kangaroo, Piglet often gets himself into confusing situations, like being stranded in trees when it's raining, if I am remembering my English childhood correctly.
My uncle, a civil engineer from New Delhi, was a contract worker for the Iraqi government in the mid 1980s. He once visited us in the UK, and insisted on taking me and my sister to Harrods. My sister immediately chose a high-quality Piglet, complete with green corduroy onesie. Actually, writing this example makes me realize that Piglet was not a baby kangaroo at all. He was an actual piglet. Sorry about that. Back to Harrods. I believe I selected a white mohair jumper that I wore on special occasions, such as Dorcas Day, throughout my adolescent years. It is difficult to explain what Dorcas Day is.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 14, 2008
Obviously: the deluxe cheeseburger franchise. Apparently: Brooklyn. But actually: the initials of an obscure experimental prose writer of Punjabi/British origin. Author of: "Monsters I have Known": an essay on inter-racial romances that ends with the soulful but unkempt and aforementioned BK drowning her sorrows in short, skim milk lattes, even though it is a well-documented fact that too much coffee makes her impervious to omens and others signs that things are or are not going well. Which is no way to live. It's precarious, and does not necessarily lead to a marital outcome. But there you have it.
With a big sigh, BK flipped through the glossy pages of Cottage Living, even though it was was clear that the so-called cottages were really five bedroom annexes to an already established empire of primrose-yellow wallpapered mansions in places like Vermont and Southern California.
by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 23, 2008