Maybe I’m out of touch with what’s happenin’ on the playground back in the States. But I can tell you what is on the minds of every 4- to 7-year-old kid I’ve met here
Monthly Archives: August 2003
TS Eliot: Four Quartets
The great poet TS Eliot uses Ailanthus altissima in his poem “Four Quartets”. Here is the opening stanza of the third Quartet, The Dry Salvages: I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a […]
Strange Fruit pt. 4
When I spotted this fruit in the market, I left the stall I was standing at and zipped over to the neighboring stall where it was being sold, five-year-old in tow. I started asking the hawker about the fruit when the lady from the previous stall came over, carrying my crying three-year-old. She shot me […]
About Ghetto Palm
These entries are dedicated to chronicling the growth of Ailanthus altissima in cultural consciousness. Simply put, I’m collecting any reference to the tree in art, literature, movies, music, etc. and putting it on the web. I also may include ecology of the tree, but it’s not my principal focus. Why am I doing this? People […]
Little Odessa
Little Odessa‘s an older movie (1994) that I just picked up on VCD a little while ago. It’s not a particularly interesting drama, but the setting is. It’s filmed in a part of New York city called Brighton Beach. It’s a decaying industrial sector with a large Russian immigrant population. The climax scene in the […]
Ghetto Palm
My newest project is something of a fan site for an unusual tree, Ailanthus altissima, the Tree-of-heaven.
Between Hope and Fear
Muslim WakeUp’s most recent article deals with the scoresheet mentality in religious observance, where promised rewards for good actions are tallied up like a “pile of candy”. I agree with Pamela’s assessment that this is the morality of toddlers. As a convert, this kind of thinking has very little appeal. In fact, this simplistic kind […]