Last night Laura called and asked if I could stand in for her at Bloomingdale's. Lancôme was doing a promotion, and Laura was supposed to work at the cosmetics counter making up from three to eight. I always do my own make-up, but one ad I did for BMW, they wanted a make-up artist. That's…
trans. Hungarian Jascha Kessler and Maria Körösy You're so brave, you camp-followers of Cain — after Baudelaire, yet! Shit-shoveling first father, your visa was validated when that cretinous cudgel whammed the wandering flock's shepherd, that day-dreaming pastor, the smoke of whose sacrifice could rise up, while yours charred on the ground. Murder — sanctified as…
trans. Danish Alexander Taylor and the author The wine that ripened up along the mountain slopes late that summer we met each other is already golden and full of the aftertaste of an abundance, evaporated like years in the sun and the night breeze looks into me with its poplar leaves: I am tired…
In 1862, Flaubert recalls for the Goncourts the beginnings of his liaison with Louise: “He told us the story of his coupling with Colet, initiated in a drive home in a carriage, painting himself as playing the role of someone disgusted with life, of the dark, handsome stranger, of the suicidal romantic, which so amused…
a clear zither complains far into the night, the moan of wind and rain swirls round in the strings. a solitary lamp, a Ch'u horn heard; a waning moon glides down behind Chang Terrace. already the fragrant grass is withered but still her lover has not come. a letter home cannot be sent for the…
The power of the celestial Lion is broken, his blazing ardor decreasing: after nights of showers of stars the late-summer sun strolls leisurely like the old lion in his cage. It was the female who wanted what might be love's last encore, not he. She pressed against the male's flank, her great, yellow body coyly…
How beautiful the letters are we never get mailed compared to the letters we send and how astonishing the answers: The unexpected words that fall together all by themselves forming perfect solutions to problems we only then discover. For instance, I knew nothing about Venezuela before I began writing these lines and now I've already…
When V. S. Naipaul was a toddler growing up in Trinidad, his grandmother sold marijuana. Only old people bought it, for, during the early 1930s in Trinidad, only the elderly, whose energies were depleted and for whom life had become boring, desired to smoke hemp. Naipaul told this story to his students at Wesleyan University…
Year in, year out, I've ploughed and fished: the gulls have come to depend on me. The steps have grown a thick mat of slate-green moss, Wisteria shoots out lush purple vines. Wind-blown orioles churr from tree to tree, Rain-dampened swallows swoop in and out of the buildings. I didn't realize the spring light was…
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