coining words. [good things]

when i was reading in azar nafisi's reading lolita in tehran and stumbled over the quote i posted last week about how she and her students explained to each other what the word upsilamba meant to them i strongly felt the urge to join in - i love inventing stuff and making stuff up in my mind. however, taking it as a noun is too narrow and to confined for me so i will just turn it into an adjective. 
so here goes:
an upsilambian feeling is that moment when your heart seems to burst out of mere joy, gladness and contentment when suddenly you feel that there is so much of said feeling inside you that you have to share it with everyone around you. you feel your upsilambianness radiate to those who are around you.
when lying in the grass, looking up to the trees and the deep blue sky, with the sun making its way through the branches now and then, it is difficult not to experience an upsilambian moment.

chatzesee. [good things]

biking everywhere somehow seems to make my world bigger than it used to be. or better: the distances between the places i love seem to shrink and i constantly discover - and rediscover - places that add a depth to what i call home i did not experience before. 
one of the rediscoverd places is the chatzesee.

azar nafisi. reading lolita in tehran. II [invented worlds]

upsilamba

"I step into the dining room with eight slim-waisted glasses whose honey-colored liquid trembles seductively. At this point, I hear Yassi shout triumphantly, "Upsilamba!"  She throws the word at me like a ball, and I take a mental leap to catch it.
Upsilamba!—the word carries me back to the spring of 1994, when four of my girls and Nima were auditing a class I was teaching on the twentieth-century novel. The class's favorite book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law. Even as a child, Nabokov tells us, Cincinnatus appreciated the freshness and beauty of language, while other children "understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with wondrous consequences,"
No one in the class had bothered to ask what the word meant. No one, that is, who was properly taking the class—for many of my old students just stayed on and sat in on of my classes long after their graduation. Often, they were more interested and worked harder than my regular students, who were taking the class for credit. Thus it was that those who audited the class—including Nassrin, Manna, Nima, Mahshid and Yassi—had one day gathered in my office to discuss this and a number of other questions.
I decided to play a little game with the class, to test their curiosity. On the midterm exam, one of the questions was "Explain the significance of the word upsilamba in the context of Invitation to a Beheading. What does the word mean, and how does it relate to the main theme of the novel?" Except for four or five students, no one had any idea what I could possibly mean, a point I did not forget to remind them of every once in a while throughout the rest of that term. 
The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokov's fanciful creations, possibly a word he invented out of upsilon, the twentieth letter in the Greek alphabet, and lambda, the eleventh. So that first day in our private class, we let our minds play again and invented new meanings of our own.
I said I associated upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be the name of a dance—you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me." I proposed that for the next time, they each write a sentence or two explaining what the word meant to them.
Manna suggested that upsilamba evoked the image of a small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. Nima added in parentheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from your class: an upsilamba to you too! For Azin it was a sound, a melody. Mahshid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting "Upsilamba!" with each leap. For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name. Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh. And to Nassrin it was the magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasures.
Upsilamba became part of our increasing repository of coded words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret language of our own. That word became a symbol, a sign of that vague sense of joy, the tingle in the spine Nabokov expected his readers to feel in the act of reading fiction; it was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from the ordinary ones. it also became the code word that opened the secret cave of remembrance."

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2003.

one-day choreographic studies. [good things]

and the music video of ingenue led me to this:

american blues festivals 1963-1966: the british tours. [blues]

the most amazing blues video out there. so much love for that one. 

shake 'em on down. [blues]

there are soo many versions of this song. from its delta blues origins on to even more grandness.
my selection: obviously, the original one by bukka white, versions by big joe williams, r. l. burnside, furry lewis and mississippi fred mcdowell. and yes, i know i included two videos of mississippi fred mcdowell, but they are just both that awesome.

azar nafisi. reading lolita in tehran. [invented worlds]

this post is somewhow mistitled but since i found this quote by czeslaw milosz in azar nafisi's memoir reading lolita in tehran i will just leave it as it is. i am sure i will post more of azar nafisi's words here in the weeks to come.

"to whom do we tell what happened on the earth, for whom do we place everywhere huge mirrors in the hope that they will be filled up and will stay so?"

czeslaw milosz. "annalena"

waiting for summer to arrive. [memories]

to be fair we already had quite a few warm spring days, but right now it is kind of cold again and i can't wait until summer's finally here. i don't really remember when exactly those pictures were taken but they just remind me so much of those long summer days back home when i was a child, roaming around with my friends after school. 

radiohead. lotus flower. & atoms for peace. ingenue. [songs]

edmund spenser. sonnet 1. [poems]

Happy ye leaves when as those lily hands,
Which hold my life in their dead doing might
Shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,
Lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
Those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
And reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
Written with teares in harts close bleeding book.
And happy rymes bath'd in the sacred brooke,
Of Helicon whence she derived is,
When ye behold that Angels blessed looke,
My soules long lacked foode, my heavens blis.
Leaves, lines, and rymes seeke her to please alone,
Whom if ye please, I care for other none.

 Spenser, Edmund. "Sonnet 1". The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. Eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy. New York, London : W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.

enno bunger. regen. [songs]

this song made its way straight into my heart and will stay there for some time to come i guess. it reminds me of the night when a friend and i were on a roadtrip through the swiss mountains and we slept in our car. since sleeping in cars is actually something we like to do and the prefered option whilst traveling we were both quite content. we were in the middle of nowhere with a beautifully clear sky full of stars to look at and comfortably tucked in, when i suddenly thought it would be perfect to listen to that song and show it to my friend who did not know it yet. however, as we were in the middle of nowhere, the internet connection was kind of sketchy, but it kind of worked sometimes and so we waited patiently for the next few seconds of the song, and the next few seconds, and the next few seconds. at some point we must have fallen asleep, but even though normally there is nothing that annoys me more than when i can't listen to the music i want to listen to it didn't change anything about the fact that the memory of that night turned into one of my most cherished memories of that summer. and now the song will be tied to that memory, which leaves it only more beautiful than before.

jonas david. shield. [songs]

tv noir is one of my favorite things ever.i love everything that regularly introduces me to wonderful music.

climbing rocks. swimming. playing cards. [travels]

on our tour through the balkans last year we found this gem. about ten kilometers south of ljubuški, kravice is a waterfall on the trebižat river. it was without a doubt one of the grand days of our journey. we spent hours doing nothing at all. enjoying the sun is simply so much more enjoyable when you know that you can just get up and jump in the river to go for a refreshing swim to cool down again. and then there were rocks to climb, which is just the most fun thing to do. ever. we also played cards. obviously. because we always do that. but that day it was even more fun that usual. we were also not quite as tired of shopska salad,  often the only vegetarian choice, as we were later on during our journey. 

sunnyland slim. woman i ain't gonna drink no more whiskey. come home baby. illinois central. [blues]

how the hell did i never hear about this guy before?
i am absolutely enamored with the piano.

the national. this is the last time. i need my girl. pink rabbits. sea of love. [songs]

"vorfreud". there is no expression in english which accurately translates the meaning of this word, or at least i still haven't found it yet. however, what i want to express with it is that i really cannot wait until it is the 13th of august. on that day the national is going to play a concert here in zurich and i already bought tickets to said concert for my sister and me. until then, everytime i will hear a song of the national a smile will creep up on my face and i will silently almost burst with joy, in the knowledge that there is something grand to look forward to. yes, i love live music more than anything in the world and sharing an experience with someone that i love just makes it that much better.

mostar III. [travels]

“wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.” anatole france

t.nile. shaky throne. [songs]

i first stumbled over this song through my love of balcony tv and i only realized about two years later that tamara nile is friends with jess and a bunch of people i met through jess in vancouver. funny that. the world has indeed become smaller. 
i hope i will one day meet her so i can tell her just how much her music means to me and how much i appreciate having discovered it amongst the vast amount of balcony tv videos out there. 

mostar II. [travels]

“like all great travelers, i have seen more than i remember, and remember more than i have seen.” 

benjamin disraeli

mostar I. [travels]

“we live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. there is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” jawaharial nehru