September 2011
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In Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room, Liesel Landauer, disquieted by Viktor’s infidelity—and especially, I think, by her own reaction to the revelation—no one but Kata, the “other” woman, can comfort her. This is not the place to point out the irony of the situation—Mawer himself never focuses on it; perhaps the irony matters least. He just gives us an image: of Kata, so small and lithe and lush and...
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distantheartbeats:
“Remember: if the sun sets, millions of stars cannot take its place.” — Faiez Al-Samaak.
He was a friend of my father’s. I don’t know much about him, just what my dad has told me. They went to school together in Iraq. My dad had a notebook that he got everyone to write in at the end of the school year. This is what Faiez wrote. I really liked it.
During the American invasion...
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“Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that...”
– From The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller.
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From “Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self,” an essay by Siri Hustvedt [included in her collection of (familiar) essays, A Plea for Eros]:
I am afraid of writing, too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where the walls don’t hold. I don’t know what’s there, but I’m pulled toward it. Is the wounded self the writing self?...
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SASHA AND THE POET by Jean Valentine Sasha: I dreamed you and he Sat under a tree being interviewed By some invisible personage. You were saying ‘They sound strange because they were lonely, The seventeenth century, That’s why the poets sound strange today: In the hope of some strange answer.’ Then you sang, ‘hey nonny, nonny, no’ and cried, And asked him to finish....
If This Were Not Love by Sid Gomez Hildawa If this were not love, I wouldn’t kiss you. My head would turn the instant your head would rise to meet mine, allowing our cheeks to console each other as I distract you with a tight embrace. My fingers would comb your hair the way mangrove roots sift through mud to anchor at the swampy edge of the bay, extending the land but not sailing away. My legs...
The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover...
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“Ah, how often my dreams have raised up before me as things, not to replace...”
– From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith.
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