Important
Of human children & language children
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The first word I ever wrote was stsikukha: « pisser ». This is how my nanny Frosya called me to my face. On poetry and pathos in a bastard tongue.
Two palindromes
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→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
Kill your darlings
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Like plots in a garden cemetery, with lamentations, good-riddances or other epitaphs.
Gerard Croiset & the adventure of the psychic detective
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The clairvoyant Dutch grocer who charted the frontiers of parapsychology and lent a hand to the FBI. « Unbelievable but true! »
Skinned alive
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Imagine your therapist assigned you to write your autobiography, after which you decided you were cured, so your therapist published it as revenge. Zeno’s Conscience turns 99.
A sangre fría
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Fernanda Melchor’s prose hits you square in the face, but its lyricism works differently in Spanish. On Veracruzano modernism, lyrical slang, and worlds so new that style falls apart.
The Archipelago Conversations, an excerpt — Interview with Édouard Glissant
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An excerpt from The Archipelago Conversations with the late French Carribean philosopher and poet. « The archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles. »
Marx and the art of natural winemaking
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The grapes are tiny, burnt to a crisp. It’s day two of the harvest, in late August — freakishly early in a year of drought and heat waves. What is wine?
The room I am in
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Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.
Glossomania-mania
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On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.
