D. E. Steward
"Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest"
Böllfrischgrasshandke
Swaziland, serene, subtle, beautiful Swaziland, now one-third HIV positive
There is a high-latitude mirage, hillingar, in which the horizon curves upward while staring far to the horizon
So that standing on snowy, open flats you may easily feel you are standing in the center of a giant caldera
Animals are thoroughly telluric in realizing that the land is not a stage but is everything, and that what we do on it ultimately is meaningless
Our individual impact is comical, what we do is merely tumbling disturbance whose impact disappears as the dust clears
Even in the surroundings of a death camp or any other ultimate site, the typography remains the same, the land will recover from whatever has gone on there
The only other country to set up facilities for mass murder, Romania killed Jews by the hundreds of thousands as its forces moved into Bessarabia in 1941 and 1942
“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite”
The genuine, uncorporatized, unadvertized, non-standardized qualities of commonplace books and vernacular architecture are usually encouraging
Like Bernard Maybeck’s dark and magical redwood Berkeley fantasies
Western naturalism and our knee-jerk acquiescence to its pervasive influence puts the brakes on things like that
Along with unquestioned American commercialism
Yellowtail, Seriola lalandi, or hamachi in Japanese, a pelagic, schooling jack, Japan’s favorite fish, farmed in the Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku
A Honda garage parts man in Louisville began to read Japanese from Japanese-manufactured parts he handles, now haunts a mall sushi bar to practice conversation, practices writing kanji in his lunch hour
The dozens of small skates, Raja erinacea, beached in the blanching sun last August, every twenty yards or so at the swash line, one after another
The immiscible is that which cannot endure mixing or blending
Beatrice Roethke cited as “Administratrix” in the Faber, 1968, Collected Poems of Theodore...
That generation was in a different assumptive realm
A remarkable number of North Americans and Europeans rendezvous in Iceland. Expedient privacy, half way, good airline connections, exotic boreal country
Brian Wilson's God Only Knows
Good Beachboys, bad Beachboys
“Mundo mundo vasto mundo, // mais vasto é meu coração”
In Elizabeth Bishop’s translation: “I oughtn’t to tell you, // but this moon // and this brandy // play the devil with one’s emotions.”
Halogen brilliant starburst glare
“One has to commit a painting the way one commits a crime”
Standing against the elements, a small and graceless child in a strange and isolated family
“To overlook what is essential and to over-estimate what is non-essential is a widely distributed error of the soul”
Military disasters generally are caused by authoritarian leaders whose need for social acceptance and fear of failure makes them dishonest, untrustworthy and irresponsible
The reference librarian on trial in Ann Arbor testified, as if it had been a Pauline experience, “She screamed when I touched her”
“Psycho-analysis is itself the disease of which it purports to be the cure”
And it becomes like another variety of theocratic fascism
Picasso’s stunning Torse de jeune fille Gósol, 1906, hides in a private collection
For five hundred years Köln’s Munster remained with its nave incomplete
That immense cathedral, the greatest building of the Rhineland, was inspiration for Schumann's Third, "The Rhenish"
The Gothic engineers left a mysterious construction crane high on the stump of the south tower where it remained well into the nineteenth century
Vida: Down the hill out of Tetuán to the shaded intersection headed for Xauen, now called Chaouèn as part of Morocco, there are still white-painted stones along that road that Arturo Barea worked on in the early 1920s
When Barea, the socialist idealist, was a Spanish army engineering sergeant
Gerald Brenan said that, “he was a dark, slight man with a lean, rather worn face… the sort of many one would run into in any Madrid café…”
Halogen brilliant luxury-car high-beam blue
Apparently they once stood with friends there on the bluff in Wehauken, Manhattan out and away, and talked about how much brighter it would look when electricity instead of gaslight, gas-mantle lamps and kerosene became standard
Those still around to see cities electrified probably never guessed at the airglow of extreme light pollution
Before Chou En-lai died January 8, 1976, it was widely reported that Mao spend many hours at the Chou’s bedside through December, that he left it only a half hour before the end
We only go to the funeral in the western world
Abuses of the Church in the Dark Ages such as tax farming and bishops owning slaves and concubines were carry-overs from familiar Roman practice
Much in the way that modes and avenues of civil corruption in Italy go back two thousand years
Already a quarter of a century ago the first Viking photographs prompted speculation that the best place to look for where life may have thrived would be where the river flowed that cut one of the immense Martian canyons
Dual-nationality Dominicans have ruled the Upper Westside for a generation, much like they do up the middle of major league infields, generally quietly, generally with authority
The Dominican Republic’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo, rounded up and executed twenty thousand Haitian immigrant workers in 1937
She remarked that to be Chinese and served Indian food is the equivalent of being French and served Saurbraten
French loftiness and guile
Ma is the most common name for people from Xinjiang, China's vast Wild West. Ma means "horse," as in Crazy Horse, Spotted Horse, Running Horse, Laughing Horse, Red Horse, Little Horse
For most Overseas Chinese going home for good at anytime is a solid if distant alternative
Frequently one of a nesting albatross pair travels up to five thousand miles for massive squid die-offs leaving its mate to care for the single egg or single hatchling
All albatross species nest on isolated islands in the southern ocean or the northern Pacific except for the waved albatross of the Galápagos
Albatrosses rarely fly, they follow the air currents with locked wing joints and glide
Out there is Niue, population about four thousand, capital Alofi, west of Tonga
More than twenty thousand Pacific islands are inhabited
The classic islands in the eastern Mediterranean, like Lemnos, Thássos, Peristera, Skyros, Chios, are the sources of much of what we are
“That people are largely influenced (and influence others) because of plausible but unproven subconscious motives and inbred traits, rather than by idealism, patriotism, a sense of duty, or even a simple wish to be rich, may cause alarm”
After both of Belize’s atolls, Glover Reef and Lighthouse Reef — only cistern water, one small hotel on each — it was three days’ sail to Key West, through the Yucatan Channel standing thirty miles off Cuba’s Cabo San Antonio
--Originally appeared in Denver Quarterly 39/4 in 2005
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Sampling credits: Ivan to Alyosha in The Brothers K, Martin Walser, Bertrand Russell, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Degas, August Bier, Hugh L’Etang