The raven didn’t hear me coming, so it broke away from the cliff at the last moment, struggled to remain airborne, and then climbed with a clumsy whooshing of wings out of the shadows and above the ridge, where it found the thermal, flexed its wing-fingers, and hung motionless for an age, the sun glinting…
Reading (and trying to sing) bits of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues over lunch, I came across the following in the 118th chorus: It’s all the same to meThe radio I dont wanta hearAnd cant have to hearPlays one thing and anotherOf great Sarah Vag A musician once told me that, during one of Ms…
Here, from Emil Helfferich (1878-1974)‘s Südostasiatische Geschichten (Jever/Oldenburg, 1966), is an account of what happened to another German-speaker who made light of girlie-men: He was German, early 30s, and came from a forest ranger’s family in Hannover. If not poverty, then extreme thrift had probably stood at the cradle of him and his numerous siblings.…
Waszynski’s extraordinary 1937 Dibuk still drifts into the occasional dream. Der Volf was written by another Polish Jewish artist, H Leivick at around the same time as the play on which Waszynski’s film was based. Both introduce the supernatural in order to help us understand why it is wrong to do wrong, but where Der…
No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been…
I have been up the coast a couple of times this week (off again tomorrow) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many spring flowers. Their profusion is partly a consequence of heavy rainfall, and partly of the fires last summer that burnt away heavy shrubbery and young pine woods, clearing the ground. However,…
This stuff should be subsidised, not banned, although I can’t work out whether the machines used to produce it are translators or generators. Here’s something I received this morning (URL omitted): Our soft pensil makes sound. Our noisy round eraser is thinking and our children beautiful spoon arrives. A golden glasses smells at the place…
Re the Dirty Kuffar video: although the transliteration changes, radical Islam has been predicting imminent victory over us for quite a long time: And Halid returned to the west of Azahfi, and said to them: – Know that these kafres are disheartened. (Anonymous, Libro de las batallas (1600)) But we aren’t, are we, because we…