Zazening

1. Zazening (new favorite word) on The Taste of Tea: Two of the film's emotional pivots involve (and I don't think I'm giving anything away) terms that, in English, are complementary, even palindromic: back flip and flip book. Does this adhere in Japanese?

2. In Pale Fire, Nabokov illuminates a trio of words (crown/crow/cow) whose structural similarities hold up across English and Russian (korona/vorona/korova, I think?).

3. The Other Ed zazens on Nicholson Baker. Have you read The Mezzanine lately? It totally holds up!

4. Team Dizzies' own Izzy is (it's a tongue-twister already) writing a column over at Jewcy about her engagement/wedding/everything! Meanwhile, Dizzyhead Mollie blogs about an erroneous wedding guide. All my ex-interns are getting married...

4. Add to queue: I recently caught two movies on a long flight, and both were excellent: Accepted (read Jane Dark's right-on review) and The Prestige (great perfs, dense plotting, down-to-the-wire carpet pulling). Curiously, on the first leg of the trip—on the same airline—I saw about five minutes of what seemed to be one of the worst movies I've sampled, and I don't mean this in a so-bad-it's good way. It was something called From Aristotle to Hawking. It began with someone intoning a passage from Aristotle's Physics . . . with a shot of some branches in a garden . . . for no apparent reason. The title fonts looked like they were done on a kid's computer (it would probably be called "Crayon" or something) . . . It was very strange, and (I began to suspect) very possibly a non-English (Greek?) production, haphazardly translated . . . but neither strange nor Greek enough to keep me watching.

5. Happy St.-Patrick's-Day birthday to two great Americans: Arlo Ogg and Gretta Cohn. (Nifty song on Gretta's page, "Bad Sleep," with the stunning line "Because you dreamed those terrible dreams." Earlier this week, reading the Times piece on the Pogues, I started zazening on their song "Dirty Old Town" (mentioned in the article); the only lyric I could bring to mind aside from the title was the lovely Dreamed a dream by the old canal...)

6. Dizzyhead Martin charmingly caves re the "no pets" rule. Zazen on that fat cat! (UPDATE: This Times article, on a reiki practitioner/cat channeler, gets my vote for headline of the week!)

7. I no longer know if I'm using zazen correctly.