Open City

Teju Cole's narrator-flâneur on Ground Zero:

"The place had become a metonym of its disaster. I remembered a tourist who once asked me how to get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones."

wilde in love

in honor of [in spite of] v-day, excerpts from a letter oscar wilde wrote to his lover (while serving time in prison for "gross indecency")--

My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. Pleasure hides love from us, but pain reveals it in its essence. To keep you in my soul, such is the goal of this pain which men call life. ... I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom, my life is a desert fanned by the delicious breeze of your breath, and whose cool spring are your eyes; the imprint of your little feet makes valleys of shade for me, the odour of your hair is like myrrh, and wherever you go you exhale the perfumes of the cassia tree. Love me always, love me always. You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life; there can be no other...

to hear garrison keillor read more, listen to writer's almanac

the sheltering sky

in 1949 paul bowles wrote a novel about morocco that grips you in the beginning, sputters out quickly, and ends tragically. i can't help but think of it as the north african version of d.h. lawrence's the plumed serpent. the plot is remarkably similar. american travelers equally repelled and fascinated by remote, exotic locale. female character gets involved with native men and submits to hypermasculine power. et cetera.

he walked through the streets... why do i feel this way about them? guilt at being well fed and healthy among them? but suffering is equally divided among all men; each has the same amount to undergo... emotionally he felt that this last idea was untrue, but at the moment it was a necessary belief: it is not always easy to support the stares of hungry people. thinking that way he could walk on through the streets. it was as if either he or they did not exist. both suppositions were possible. the spanish maid at the hotel had said to him that noon: "la vida es pena." "of course," he had replied, feeling false even as he spoke, asking himself if any american can truthfully accept a definition of life which makes it synonymous with suffering.

even cowgirls get the blues

all of my favorite authors are (or were) dirty old men. sots. swillers of liquid wisdom. so why does robbins' sloppy lesbo-pastoralism surprise me? maybe because this is the same guy who writes elsewhere about goddess religions and sexually powerful female characters. i assumed he was one of the more "evolved" (this word is so perfect -- i always think of the mom in running with scissors using it to describe her new boyfriend) writers of the 70's. now the trope is "attractive women will have fantasy sex with each other if given the opportunity"... bleh. i wanted to stop reading after the first sex scene, but somehow i made it all the way past the love letter from jelly to sissy (what is this, x-rated jane austen?). think i'll call it quits on page 180. this is not to say that the book is not otherwise good, just that i want to kick robbins in his babymaker (yeah, i said it).

here is a rather innocent passage from p.49:

the author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. our brains permit us to utilize such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction. we employ drugs, yogic techniques and poetics--and a thousand more clumsy methods--in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.