Our Ecstatic Days

I just know it's slipping away. I can hear it in the walls, it sings to me. I hear death spreading through the baseboards or in the ceilings, sometimes it's just old age. Sometimes it's something unbearably sad the house never recovers from, an untimely death, the end of a marriage, an act of violence, something only the house knows, something only the house has seen, a betrayal the house absorbs while shielding the habitants from it. Sometimes when a house dies, it's an act of sacrifice.

from Our Ecstatic Days
by Steve Erickson
Simon & Schuster, 2005

Travel Guide to the Forest of Meaning

What is poetry?
Vessel headed for no port

What is imagination?
The scent of reality

What is the face?
Port for the migration of tears

What is day?
A cage to trap sunlight

What is poverty?
A grave moving above ground


from Travel Guide to the Forest of Meaning
by Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said)
translated by Marilyn Hacker, via the French version of Venus Khoury-Ghata
appearing in Rattapallax 12, 2005

Jade Lady Burning

In the Army you get used to things like this: not really being in charge of an investigation, not knowing all of what's going on, just being told to watch somebody and report back. People think of the Army as being demeaning. In a lot of ways it is. Though I think many civilian jobs have the same demands: don't ask questions, just do it.

from Jade Lady Burning
by Martin Limon
Soho Crime, 1992

Turkish author Elif Shafak acquitted

I am concerned about an idea that has recently developed in Turkey, the idea that 'those who do not think like us are cooperating with the enemy.'

Elif Shafak
(U.S. agent Marly Rusoff & Associates)
quoted in Turkish author cleared in controversial book trial

Snakepit (2)

Living in this atmosphere was not conducive to one's health, sanity, equilibrium. How he now itched to go back to the cattle trail, where a heap of dung meant that cows were in the vicinity. Here they were in the city, chasing a trail of human dung, but without the certainty that there was a human being, living or dead, at the end of it.

from Snakepit
by Moses Isegawa
Alfred A. Knopf, 2004

Congo Journey

In the Belgian colonial memory, as in my novelist's fantasy, Bukavu was a lost paradise, a misted Shangri-La of wide, bougainvillea-laden streets and lakeside villas with lush gardens sloping to the shore. The province of South Kivu was to Central Africa what biblical Palestine was to Arabia. The volcanic soil of the surrounding hillsides was so fertile, the climate so benigh, that there was scarcely a fruit, flower or vegetable that didn't thrive there. But Eastern Congo has like every paradise a fatal flaw: It is a natural treasure chest of gold, diamonds, cassiterite and now coltan and uranium, which for centuries has lured every known species of human predator to its misted hills and jungles, from freebooting Rwandan militias to suited corporate carpetbaggers with nice manners and fat checkbooks and shiny offices in London, Houston, St. Petersburg and Beijing.

from Congo Journey
by John le Carre
The Nation

Snakepit

I always had the perception that you were dynamic, visionary, calculating, but the evidence here is different, demoralizing. I see resignation with the missionary spirit thrown in to sweeten it up. Are you so deep under the influence of that old narcotic, love? Has it juggernauted and crushed your judgement out of shape?

from Snakepit
by Moses Isegawa
Alfred A. Knopf, 2004

Atomik Aztex

I can't hold it against the cops. Christians, sub-atomik physicists & alcoholiks alike, they're seekers after a simpler world with easier answers. We adults must accept that complications have set in.

from Atomik Aztex
by Sesshu Foster
City Lights, 2005