It is Saturday after a long week of long posts, so this is going to be short (and tomorrow even shorter). Just as yesterday was written for your ears, as he asked you to listen (not to me or him, but to a conversation as a way of knowing, making and remembering), today is a […]
On this day commemorating incomplete emancipation, I offer you this unfinished blogpost in the form of three unanswerable questions: How many Republican sheep does it take to maintain Trump’s regime? How many armed militia statue-protectors does it take to maintain settler colonialism? How many commercial prisons does it take to maintain racist injustice? This blogpost […]
A voice comes from somewhere (or within), braying: Well, listen to him! So sanctimonious in his white wokeness and so-called decolonial critique (whatever that is)! We see what you’re doing, writing this out loud for strangers’ ears, but inwardly, under your typing tongue, you murmur, “Oh, let the old guard suffer, so I can profit!”. […]
On April Fools Day last year (sic), I learned from various news pages and extremely angry Facebook posts that at least seventy-six women, mostly Syrians, were detained near “Chez Maurice” in Jounieh – a town of “prostitution” north of Beirut, near the sea – as prisoners of sexual abuses. They were tortured and not allowed […]
In our current state of governmental chaos, I hark back to a surprisingly overlooked statement by President Trump’s White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson. After completing his medical assessment of Trump, Jackson stated, and I paraphrase, that Trump was highly unusual in that each day he begins anew, unfettered by memory or attention to consequences […]
He was praying like that and holding on to the altar When the Sibyl started to speak: “Blood relation Of gods, Trojan, son of Anchises, It is easy to descend into Avernus. Death’s dark door stands open day and night. But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air, That is the task, […]
I have foreseen and foresuffered all – Aeneas in Seamus Heaney’s “The Golden Bough” (Virgil’s Aeneid 6, 98-148) from Seeing Things I might have been a wise king setting out Under the Christmas lights – except that It felt like the forewarned journey back Into the heartland of the ordinary. – Philip Larkin in Seamus […]
You had meant it as a brief stop on the way to somewhere else, but it ended up being the story of your day and perhaps your whole visit. Your main destination was the Benaki Museum Pireos Street Annexe, but you wanted to plan a route via quick visits to the Museum of Islamic Art […]
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956 – Allen Ginsberg ‘America’ When Plato died, the only material possessions he left behind were a small garden next to the Academy, two slaves, a bowl with which he made offerings to the gods and a tiny […]