True Love

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

Angel

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 30, 2007

Humanimal

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 30, 2007

Architecture 1

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

humanimal

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 20, 2006

Piglet

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 09, 2009

Miss Libby

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.

by Bhanu: A Failed Novelist January 21, 2008