Pilgrim on Tinker Creek
23 July 2008
by: Annie Dillard
When I was young, well, for the whole of my formative years, I thought creek differed from crick in that creeks were generalized and what we had further down the driveway was a crick, our crick, the one and only crick. Eventually, I learned this was a pronunciation thing; the Tamarack is in fact a creek and a crick, both.
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Una Forchetta
21 July 2008
I’ve come to a fork in my work. As Annie Dillard writes of forks:
Let me pull the camera back and look at the fork in the road from a distance, in the larger context of the speckled and twining world. It could be that the fork will disappear, or that I will see it to be but one of many interstices in a network, so that it is impossible to say which line is the main part and which is the fork.
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Stuck in Time
16 July 2008
Our world is laden with possibilities. This is a cliche and it is true. The internet lessens gaps between what we want to see and what we can see, considerably. I get the feeling that this coming generation will believe that all things come at the touch of a button and that the differences, for them, between reality and what is on the glowing screen will be less and less clear. But, isn’t everyone always fearful for the “coming generations?”
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Porius
8 July 2008
by: John Cowper Powys
The forests of Edeyrnion, Ynys Prydein, were of the ancient mythical sort. Ancient even in Porius’s time, 499; trees already brought dust to dust, trees whose liquid properties extended so far beyond the usual solid wooden type, trees that spoke, trees that moved more than swayed, trees whose leaves whispered by the wind from the south particularly. The earth of the forests had history and in certain places, history made itself known. Porius ab Einion ab Iddawc complacently plodded through such forests; through such forests Porius’s subtle mind-butterflies fluttered.
The Body's Long Madness
7 July 2008
What is The Body’s Long Madness?
It’s a book I’m writing.
How long have I been writing this book?
Sometimes I feel like I’ve been writing this book for five years and then I remember, I have, in various stages and various transformations, very off and on. What I began in June 2003 in Rome I began again—very differently—in June 2007 in Bracciano and haven’t stopped since.
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The Desert Nomad
2 July 2008
[Another excerpt from the current draft of the current part and current chapter of The Body’s Long Madness]
Six knees drop into the sand led by the eldest and most weather worn. He takes his hand and brushes slowly and most expertly the sand off of a defined greyish mound. He tunnels his hands, one to each side, bringing up a lumpy grey loaf of bread.
“This is how the man eats,” Malik interprets. “In the morning he buries the dough with coals and by noon or when he is hungry, the bread is ready. It is very good bread.”
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Eid-ul Adha
30 June 2008
[Taken from the current draft of The Body’s Long Madness. See supplement SEX in this same chapter.]
The Islamic holiday of Eid-ul Adha coincides with the day before Valerie’s planned departure from Nabeul.
Valerie wakes that morning, an outsider to what seems to her like a gruesome holiday…..