This morning I finished George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which I greatly enjoyed. I enjoyed it not only for the quick flecks of prose that struck like the tongue of a benevolent snake; not only for the scenes of the self-evinced departed rummaging through their own private psychoses, e.g. the Bardo; not only for the utterly imaginative mechanisms and rules of the in-between to which they clung; but for the manner in which […]
A film lies over the world, a distortive coating– a difficulty that has been sprinkled throughout the realm. Somehow we let the powder escape from the bag: the dust that causes permanence to fracture and dissemble into half-lives, the dust that causes recognition to thicken and cloud into obscurity. The wind blew it in all directions. Now everything is a strange, skewed cinema of what it once was. Now fading has become natural, and youth […]
We can’t be happy, Hafiz says, until we discover we’re not who we think we are. Then he leans near, whispers… So… how are we going to pull that off? I think he’s going somewhere with this. I can’t help myself: I’m grinning like the operator of a prison search light who’s secretly pulling for the inmates to escape and run riot, waiting for my Friend’s next words to bust through the cell block wall and stride […]
Embracing Forever 