The beautiful game

Poland vs Russia, refereed by a German.
Red shirts amid waves of white.
Russia Day.
A Russian proclamation in the heart of Warsaw.
A cracker of a Polish equaliser.

Scream, scream, scream.
What a glorious glorious glorious thing sport is.

And the day arrives

Selected Poems, by Vladimir Nabokov.
"This title will be auto-delivered to your Kindle on May 29, 2012."

No more scrounging around in old city libraries for scraps of verses in out-of-print editions and furtively taking snaps on the phone for posterity. No more zealous inquiries in second-hand stores on travels in foreign lands, run by old men with hopeful eyes that turn wistful at the mention of the name.

The poet who emigrated to prose, is coming home.
Finally.

The most evocative thing ever put to film

[Carlos Kleiber conducting the Liebestod from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde". At Bayreuth, perhaps 1975.]

There you have it, the only thing any of us will ever need to know. The purpose of art, the justification of all existence.

Mild und leise,
wie er lächelt,
wie das Auge
hold er öffnet...

Q&A

Her: Favourite song.
Him: "Videotape", by Radiohead.
Her: Undisputably?
Him: Undisputably. 

Her: Most overrated of all human qualities.
Him: Intelligence.
Her: Most despicable?
Him: Hubris. 

Her: The most beautiful three-worded phrase in the English language. 
Him: Take me away.  

Her: Somewhere you'd love to live. Sometime.
Him: Way too many wheres, too many whens to name one. 
Her: I thought we had agreed that those sort of responses were "irresponsible". Verbalise the moment's desires please.
Him: Venezia. Early sixteenth century. Dorsoduro. In the depths of winter, preferably. 

Her: Motto in life. 
Him: Life doesn't fascinate you unless it is fascinated by you. 

Her: Death.
Him: That singular moment we spend our life in preparation for. If not for it, how would you précis a lifetime's worth of reality? 

Her: Favourite Quote.
Him: "Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages." - Marcel Proust 

Her: Three people you'd wish to spend an evening with.
Him: I want five.
Her: How about four?
Him: Bargaining, seriously? You sound like Charon.
Her: And you're Aeneas? Cough up the two extra obols, mister.
Him: How about two more questions than initially agreed?
Her: Now, that's good business. A quintet it is then.
Him: Sergei Diaghilev, Anna Akhmatova, Carlos Kleiber, Christopher Hitchens, Caravaggio.

Her: Greatest love story ever told.
Him: Lolita. 

Her: One thing you can't live without.
Him: Nothing in life is indispensable. 

Her: Moving to an island. One book, only one. For the rest of life.
Him: You don't have to sound so pleased about the whole idea, you know.
Her: Of course. What else do you think is the point of doing all this.
Him: Philip Larkin's Collected poems.

Her: One trait that would instantly, unconditionally, endear any girl to you. Like being a ballerina. Or being Armenian. Or having size 7 feet. 
Him: A love of reading Pynchon. With that, believe me, she'd have me by the neck. 

Her: Your greatest inadequacy. 
Him: Not being as well-read as I'd have liked to be. 

Her: One abstraction that you're obsessed with.
Him: Distances. In time, in space. Between people, between nations, between ideas.
Her: Care to elaborate?
Him: That will count towards another question.
Her: I should've known. No thanks, cheapskate. 

Her: The hardest thing about being in love?
Him: Being selfish.

Eulogium

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.
...
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me."

-- Mark Anthony
[Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II]

Your past

is the blinking neon sign outside the bedroom window
that helplessly trickles in through the blinds
to come to rest
on your skin's restless cadence.

It is
the sublime tenderness that colours my everything.

Sleepy SMS

[For P.S.]
Someday, the "I" shall disappear, from bedside confessionals and tableside squabbles, from doodled margins in notebooks and pickled thoughts in solitude, as it shuts its tired wings and nestles into the eager embrace of the second person singular, you.

Drowse.

Sleepy. At the desk.

Think. Stir awake.
Think, think, think.

Question.
When was the last time you dozed off in a controlled environment?

The classroom, of course, where else?
As she unravels macroeconomics, framed in a long horizontal window with snow flakes on the sill. What else? Drippy coats on shiny metal next to the door. Her lopsided handwriting on transparent plastic, those amusing fumbles with the overhead projector. More? The day's edition of wall street journal splayed open, my scribbles all over. Her sepia ballet flats. That's all?  Another breakfast-less morning. Her voice. The way she says "Modigliani". Her eyes.

Oh.
How can I not dream?