Category: Nonfiction
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On a separate matter
I’ve written before about my time working in pubs but I wanted to share another story from those days that has been on my mind lately. One of the pub’s regulars was a short, hollow-cheeked man of middle-age who always wore a zip-up vest and a military cap. I’ll refer to him here as X. Read.
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On Raymond Carver
I finished Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, finished the titular story and the collection, as we finally left behind a sprawling, half dry salt lake in the middle of Turkey, and shortly after we, from a roadside seller (who, before he saw us pulling in, was reclining in the drivers’ Read.
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On three things on the walls of my grandmother’s house
1. A photo of my grandfather. His smiling face, gold tooth and bare forehead, in a small wooden frame. This photo and a recording of his voice (in which the timbre of his voice falls somewhere between my father’s and my uncle’s) and apocryphal stories of his life, and death, is all I remember of Read.
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Untitled [On connecting the dots]
When I was a small child the mysteries and potentialities of a dot to dot picture would fill my stomach with what I understood were butterflies. I favoured blue-ink pens for the task of doing a dot to dot, colouring the finished picture in with textas or pencils later maybe but treating the dots and Read.
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Some travel notes
“$22, one carton.” Cigarettes for sale on the plane. Lights are dimmed and switched off – peach sunset. Time to KL: 6:26 Distance to KL: 5,426 km Outside air temp: -18 C Altitude: 10364 m Old Indian man stares ahead at the blank screen as if there is something showing, sips wine from a plastic Read.
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On love
Stefany Anne Golberg’s article on Waiting for Godot, and love, is worth a fistful of your private moments. You could, like Vladimir or Estragon, easily be talked into hanging yourself from a tree by the only one who could save you from it. We must escape. We cannot. We can’t go on. We do. I Read.
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On the names of things – Part II
There was a domestic dispute in the block of flats across from mine last night. I was washing dishes when I heard screaming and fragile things breaking and grunting. It began in one of the apartments that faces mine, the balcony door open to the warm night, the argument therefore audible, and later continued in Read.
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On the names of things
Only when writing do I wonder about the names of things. I haven’t been writing so I haven’t been wondering about the names of things. Of course I have been writing, but not the kind of writing where I wonder about the names of things. * A young man squats out of the sun as Read.
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On Chi Vu’s Anguli Ma
Anguli Ma is a murderer. In the versions of the myth that I found online, his name is Angulimala, named as such for the garland of fingers, lopped from the hands of his victims, that he wears around his neck. The wicked man is one finger away from completing his finger-necklace when Buddha convinces him Read.
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On the 12 best books of 2012
You don’t know me at all. Read.
Tristan Foster 