Friday

A few excerpts I like lately

Michel Faber's Bye-bye Natalia:

The hem of her dress is unraveling. The lace is old: she likes to tell her friends that it was originally part of the shawl of a nineteenth-century countess who was executed by the Russians. In truth she found it in a basket of assorted remnants at a street market in Kiev and has no idea how old it is.

Amy Leach's Sail on My Little Honey Bee

To get an idea of the relationship between the Earth and the Moon and the Sun, find two friends and have the self-conscious one with lots of atmosphere be the Earth and the coercive one be the Sun. And you be the Moon, if you are periodically luminous and sometimes unobservable and your inner life has petered out. Then find a large field and take three steps from the Earth, and have the Sun go a quarter mile away.

For an idea of how long your light takes to reach Earth, sing one line from a song, such as "Sail on, my little honey bee," and that is how long the moonlight takes. The Earth can sing the same line back to you, to represent earthlight. "Sail on, my little honey bee." As for the Sun, he should sing as lustily as sunlight; have him discharge the song "I Gave Her Cakes and I Gave Her Ale," which is eight minutes long, which is how long sunlight takes to reach the Earth. Also the Earth may sing to the Sun and the Sun to the Moon and the Moon to the Sun, songs of representative length.

Elmore Leonard's novel Pagan Babies:

"Does he tell you you have beautiful eyes?"
"He tells me of bodies found near Ruhengeri, this time tourists who came to see the gorillas, hacked to pieces, hack to pieces, the genocide beginning again."


***
:I don't think I'll ever be as close to anyone as I am with books. I've always had this idea of opening up a small coffee shop with fluxus art in all the corners of the shop, organizing small ideas into wooden crates or library card catalog cabinets. And books. Books organized by color for sale next to pictures of espresso.

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