I was once walking in Los Angeles, in Silver Lake, thinking I was part of a fine, long tradition exemplified by Benjamin, Baudelaire, Debord et al, that I was a flâneur and a psychogeographer, observing things and soaking up ambiances. I was also taking photographs. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, I lost my footing on a perfectly innocent bit of sidewalk — having eyes in the back of my head would have been no help at all — and I made a rapid, involuntary forward dive in the direction of the ground. But it was the kind of descent that still gave me enough time to do a modicum of thinking. One of my hands was free, the other held my camera, which wasn’t especially valuable but also not disposable, and I was afraid it was going to smash as I hit the ground. So, I held the camera close and put out my other arm to break my fall. This worked, to a strictly limited extent. Yes, the arm broke my fall, but in the process, I broke the arm in three places.
Keen in both its humor and in its pathos, the novel captures the acuteness and anguish of childhood and adolescence. The people Ruby loves — her long-suffering and perplexed father, her rebellious and artistic older sister Rania, and, above all, the woman of whom she explains, "Something on the shelf of my mother's heart died when she came to England" — comprise just a few of the somebodies of the title, evoking Ruby's broken but radiant world, a place suffused with grim humor and sad, strange aching.
Michael Ignatieff’s “On Consolation” presents a series of thoughtful essays on some of the great works of consolation in the Western tradition, from essays and speeches to painting (El Greco) and music (Mahler), taking us chronologically from the Book of Job to Cicely Saunders, a British doctor who was a pioneer in palliative care.
On Sunday, Xiao Ming dreams of an embargoed island
to which no other nation sells food. Wasteful Singaporeans
have over-eaten at the bestial shrine of Hunger.