‘Understand the game and play it together; let the necklace not fall into

another’s hands [double meaning: let there be no defeat (hār) by the hand of

another].’

‘Play on this very day; when will [the chance] come again; when the game is

over, when will anyone get to play [again]?’

‘Oh, woman, the game is blessed which is played with the rasa of love; how

can domination [by a husband] go together with agreeable comfort.’

Padmāvat 63.5-7 by Malik Jayasi

Hi, beautiful people!

I hope you are ending this year ‘that has been,’ with introspection, lots of self-care, and abundant nature. I have missed my virtual hugs. 2024 is almost here. A very happy freak new year.

I finally found time. To write this letter to you all. I finally found my voice after months of procrastination and debilitating sadness. A lot has happened and is happening. There are days when you wish you had the courage and energy to walk out of the main door into oblivion of all the things that make America worthy of being so beautiful, enchanting, and sometimes surprising. The topos and the veritas change like chameleons here, and because I do not drive, I am confined to staying with my best friend, whom I worship, for he can stay glued to his chair inside a dingy room with books and Katlan. But I only wish and hope. A series of sadness engulfs me. I venture out and all out and then hermit for weeks, thinking about my many book projects and ideas that are spiraling.

I miss home, and yesterday, I again dreamt of Jaguar, my dog, who passed away recently. I think about failure a lot these days. I think about everything I have lost and those who left me. I think about the last 30 years of my life that have been spent- yes, spent, like proper. Spent properly.

I finally completed my research and successfully (in my eyes) completed my thesis on Bhansali’s Padmaavat and the operatic elements therein. I am over the moon with completing another semester at Iowa State University. Another year has passed with joy, tears, love, and frustrations. I have felt all the feelings. I pray every day, more fervently now. I am knee-deep in my responsibilities as a living body on this woeful earth with dreary prospects. I am starting to think about what’s next. Where is it after Ames that I would like to go to?

I have also joined as an associate poetry editor at one of my formative years-favorite and highly admired magazines in the literary world, The DIAGRAM. I am also reading visual artwork and poetry for Flyway Journal (Check these places of wonders! Now!). I suggest you dive into them if you haven’t yet; both have a lot of substance and heart to offer. I am finally, very finally, done with most of the nonfiction workshops of my literary MFA (I feel I lived a lot of lives with the deluge of workshops I took, also noting to my readers that I am serious about scripts as we speak after my scriptwriting workshop), and now I am onto the fun part of my studies: research and science writing (a lot of it—I am using this term to encompass the vastness of my attempts and exhilarations). As a program assistant, the past semester was heavy and heavy- cheese quite!

I am dyinggggg to get my hands dirty with this vastness that is my life. I live in between and with wonder. Look at my face (old picture because, believe it or not, finally, age has made me not switch on my camera every five minutes of my life). I do-

I have enjoyed the virtuosity of opera, the versatility of found footage films, and the many journals/magazines that I read every day to see the beauty of the mind in this world by my dear artist friends. I am watching a lot of tv shows these days, and the art scouring I am doing is going HARD to include some into my potential thesis, which is based on mathematics, and a lot of my father is in it. It is a spiritual lyricism that has been an ongoing process, and my revisions are beckoning me. I have a book or two (?) to finish before I graduate.

"The voice is the hope that gets kneaded/ with the blood of noisy silences, / sonorous fear, future oblivion, / a blind dog at the door of my house." ("La voz es la esperanza que se amasa / con sangre de silencios de ruido, / miedo sonoro, porvenir de olvido, / perro ciego en la puerta de mis casa." (first quatrain of the sonnet "The Poet reclaims His Voice")

Winter is going to peak for more months than I can count. It will also peak with found friends like family and additions and subtractions to these familial equations. And I will do what I have been doing since I was six—researching and writing. I have time and space to attempt my art. Now. I am collecting a whole file of blocks of pages and papers of poems, articles, and excerpts to help me in my upcoming thesis research. Yesterday, for instance, was one of the most productive days.

I completed a book on pleasure activism by that same title, which really got me going to finish this newsletter and also pumped me to start my day with Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution, which ended with discussions on the problem of “self” in the essays and iterative forms of Decreation: Poetry, Essays, opera, and starting other three new reads that are going to take up most of my January before the semester roars: Wireless Dada by Kurt Beals, Narrative Truthiness: The Logic of Complex Truth in Hybrid (Non)Fiction, Genre, and Extravagance in the Novel: Lower Frequencies.

What makes something colorful and emotional, not to mention meaningful and readable, is not directly tied to concrete experience, especially if we consider the role of language in representation and start parsing emotional reality from concrete reality and the subjectivity and objectivity each implies. Moreover, all historical narratives are complicated by the context in which they are constructed and received. I also attended other amazing conference workshops and conversed with friends and acquaintances. For Galway Kinnell, it was “the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting.” (The workshop I attended by the Community of writers was excellent!).

I am again quoting my favorite poem of my favorite poet:

Walking the Tracks, By Alexa Garvoille

As a girl, I’d walk the rails the length of town,

thinking the summer into a vanishing point

between the side-by-side outcroppings

of scrubby trees just under the highway bridge.

Past the firepits of the railyard, muddy

currents flashed twenty yards underfoot,

and the water trapped in pools at the riverbank

warmed all afternoon like reptiles in the sun.

My Tevas left lazy prints on metal tracks.

I’d put a penny on the rails to watch it

transform into shine and curve by the heat

of speed. One afternoon, a man caught me.

It’s boys like you that derail these trains.

When I picked her up, she’d be warm and

smooth, hot through. On the Wisconsin

& Southern, the coal came by every night

at nine. It shook the house, and I felt it

all the way up in my bedroom. The train’s gone,

past the river. I stand before my childhood mirror,

turning chin left and right, balancing the track.

I squint to see a boy, a ripple driving away

from a place I thought firm–a place where I

jump out from the bushes just to hear a little

scream, just to startle myself to life.

In geometry, in the way we construct our planar number system, it's impossible to make a circle without eternally refining, yet we draw one any-way- Robert Manaster

Links to start and end your days:

1. Another innovative longish test to know thyself- who likes to know their personality types and all that? ME!

2. This very invigorating home tour of a Colorado mansion

3. Learn about pasta types

4. Michelle Visage: In The Bag | Episode 18 | British Vogue

5. Is Life Better in the USA or Europe?

6. A Collection of Nyangsoop Cooking During All Four Seasons

7. Making A Worn-Down Home Look Fancy

8. Take 2 apples and make this dessert in 5 minutes!

9. Easy Korean Street Toast | Making Cabbage Egg Sandwich

10. Soundtrack from an Imaginary Western

11. Daily Life Living in Japan

12. Solo Air Tent Camping in Rain / Mushroom🍄 tent?

13. How North Korea Finally Made It Impossible to Escape

14. $10,000 Charcuterie Board

15. Japan's Strangest Livestream | Nasubi

16. Dua Lipa Eats 8 Traditional French Dishes

17. How Strong Is Amsterdam's Bud?

18. 20 Things That Made the World a Better Place in 2023

19. Two Poems by Summer Awad

20. 100 Things We Learned in 2023 (I love lists like theseeeeee)

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