Tom Fahy

Motonori Sato: Surfing on the Eisbach

Administrator — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:03:37 +0000

Music: “Letters to Allayne,” by Tom Fahy

“Skeleton Lake Sonata” in Egypt

Administrator — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 01:54:09 +0000

Op. 6, No. 20, from Op.6, Nos. 18-25 (Stag Records, 2012)

1987 (Poems)

Administrator — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 01:07:13 +0000

“1987,” a collection of prose and narrative poetry, had a brief incarnation as “It Went Up In Flames,” (Orchard Park Press, 2011). The former title has been revised and expanded…

Details

ISBN: 978-1-105-47697-6
Copyright: Tom Fahy (Standard Copyright License)
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Orchard Park Press
Published: 2012
Language: English
Pages: 105

Binding: Perfect-bound Paperback
Interior Ink: Black & white
Dimensions (inches): 7.5 wide × 7.5 tall
Design and Photography by: Tom Fahy

Purchase Link: Lulu.com (Feb. ’12)
List Price: $25.00

Book Cover

Ted Buracas: One Second

Administrator — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:30:45 +0000

Photography by: Ted Buracas
Music by: Rachael Eisley, courtesy Stag Records.

Valparaíso, a Film Essay

Administrator — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:49:51 +0000

Date: 1963
Directed by: Joris Ivens
Script: Chris Marker
Cinematographers: Georges Strouvé & Patricio Guzmán
Music by: Gustavo Becerra
Produced by: Argos Films / University of Chile.
Spanish subtitles by: Richard Greene

Slovenia!

Administrator — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:36:44 +0000

Follow the Tramping Adventure on http://www.robinbackman.com

Cut on Open Source Software Kdenlive: http://kdenlive.org

Music by Eddie Vedder – The Wolf (remix by DJ Ellert), Tom Fahy – Woodlawn at Night

Hélène Grimaud – Interview

Administrator — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 03:14:23 +0000

The most beautiful moments are not the formally perfect. On the contrary, they are when you feel the fragility, the abyss… when you feel that everything is at stake… those are the moments that touch me, that excite me the most, that seize me. I think that art best expresses itself in risk, not in comfort. —Hélène Grimaud

Orchard Park, A Novel by Tom Fahy

Administrator — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:41:09 +0000

The verdict is in: this book is truly terrible. I read it three times to be sure. I may read it once more. I am a sucker for punishment. —Aaron Desmond

Granted: the BMW beats the handlebars of my bike...

This book is dedicated to Jennifer Allayne Ashby. While many of the characters in the book are works of my imagination, Jennifer Ashby is not. She lives and breathes. Why did I dedicate the book to her? Because everything I ever learned about bravery and chose to forget I learned from Jennifer. She once sang aloud, to my face, every last word of Siouxsie Sioux’s “The Last Beat of My Heart.”

In the sharp gust of love
My memory stirred
When time wreathed a rose
A garland of shame
Its thorn my only delight
War torn, afraid to speak
We dare to breathe
Majestic
Imperial
A bridge of sighs
Solitude sails
In a wave of forgiveness
On angels’ wings

Reach out your hands
Don’t turn your back
Don’t walk away
How in the world
Can I wish for this?
Never to be torn apart
Close to you
‘Til the last beat
Of my heart

At the close of day
The sunset cloaks
These words in shadowplay
Here and now, long and loud
My heart cries out
And the naked bone of an echo says
Don’t walk away

Reach out your hands
I’m just a step away
How in the world
Can I wish for this?
Never to be torn apart
Close to you
‘Til the last beat
Of my heart

How in the world
Can I wish for this?
Never to be torn apart
‘Til the last beat
‘Til the last fleeting beat
Of my heart

In gratitude, I composed “A Day in the Life,” from the album, My Favorite Spring.

If you enjoyed reading the book online for free, consider buying a copy…

Purchase Link: Lulu.com
List Price: $25.00

The Book Burner, the Sleeper and the Stalking Womb

Administrator — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:07:30 +0000

Between storms in a wooden chair in tall
grass, your hair drying, wisps in the wind, I
watch from within the circumference of
willow roots, behind her braids. I won’t
approach over heaved ground, won’t show
hunger mercy. I’ll sit among the rocks, atop
weeping nettles, under dripping pine,
beneath a clouded sky, upon the shore of the
sand-bottomed frog-pond, in the company of
roaming snapping-turtles, with calico Ivy in
the ferns covered in blood. My thumb is
swollen from sucking, and the flesh under my
eyes is dark and raw.

Treetops moan in the west-wind, bend at
their waists, rounding bodices filled with
desperate whispers. A place of accumulated
essences, distilled impressions, something
nearby holding a leather leash, standing in
the tall cedars, masked by dead limbs and
brown, curling leaves; a Stalking Womb, a
pitch father, all knuckles and elbows, a
decaying shock-trooper out-of-time,
wrestling with time, shaping disfigured
Dresden orphans from the mud, striking
them into life with a cane of birch.

The painted hedge tied with webs spun by
pearl spiders ringing belt-like Book Burner’s
bleached-bone fortress, who perches under a
vent with a furrowed brow, a cinch-scrunched
nose, and untrimmed mustache, with an
acetylene torch, warming bindings, loosening
leaves of brittle-paged digests, I in worn-
kneed corduroys on my segmented belly,
inching into the yard through thistle-down,
the Stalking Womb in wool near but not near
enough, never with sufficient mass to bend
the property into a steep bowl with its own
tantalizing horizon.

Under crab-apple tents, through the crooked
hatchet-hewn trellis festooned with limp
balloons, behind me, wreathed in blue smoke
carried east on black wings, the wooden, tar-
papered tower, and the Sleeper under gables.
In my dreams, a blackbird carries in its
obsidian beak the Sleeper’s marble eyes to the
silent rookery in the larches, east, where trees
are caped and bonneted, picked clean of pearl
spiders by pink-jacketed mantis’.

Over whittler’s rinds, mineral-flecked earth,
the leathery carcasses of worms, into the
bald, beige, hard-packed dog run, railed by
stalks of suspiring steel grass, past the stone
Bolzoi with cloth haunches bedded in soft ash
dimpled by raindrops, motionless under rose
prickled lintels, Book Burner’s sole
companion, carved with a Cooper adz from
felled trees reserved by God for aristocratic
beasts.

The Bolzoi—the once elegant alarm—is lame;
she won’t stir in her ashes, or smell my
chafed skin through long, striped sleeves,
while the Sleeper, snug where once a bell
hung, swaying in an unpadded cradle, pink
gauze in her empty sockets, will plaint
through cracked lips: “Hurry. The Stalking
Womb is on the stair!”

Book Burner, in the dusk of his rendering
room, dim-witted, abloom nevertheless with
the will to the mystical, a toe-hold on
masterfulness, beating back with a rod carved
with symbols of dignified error the spiraling
compasses, the barometers of conscience,
self-possessed, who with a command of high
illusion, who with special organs, who with
intuition, exalts the Sleeper though the
Stalking Womb perish.

And the Sleeper on whose behalf I belly-crawl
with unconscious faith, for whom truth is not
necessarily good, in any quantity, under all
circumstances, if wisdom is not in earnest
brought to bear on the living, while the
mantis’ chitter, carry the standards of folly, of
fact, of hither and yon, against the claims of
ascending value.

Mixing ash with mortar, Book Burner
bricking up the lightless passages to a third
kind of knowing, to hardy percepts designed
to suborn the reasoning mind and the brittle-
legged men, dwarfed by craft, rising in nearby
locks, to inch down the still-watered canal,
dead mules on the banks; inch west to crush
what’s left in the aggregate of vocation, to
campaign against the Sleeper’s verdicts, to
sew doubt in the property once more; to try
our Gods.

Under several seasons of willow branches,
beneath the Bolzoi’s curling nails, the rotting
placard: TEST, NOT TRUST, and below the
placard, one layer each of children, lye and
fools.

Excerpted from 1987, a collection of prose and narrative poetry by Tom Fahy, available from Lulu.com.