beckoning with a blade

“Beyond the subways, there were the trains. I was leaving Paris at midnight from Gare de l’Est. So long ago I can’t remember, but I believe I had my eye on Basel in Switzerland; I would have been interested in where Nietzsche died. I was tired, not feeling well, but I was intent on getting the most of an unlimited pass good for two months on continental trains. I could save money on lodging by selecting night trains with sleeping compartments. Aboard my car, I was patiently navigating down its narrow corridor. Directed at the man pushing ahead in front me, I heard in French, ‘All I need is the ticket.’ A gentleman facing us beckoned with a blade.”

~~ from “Chinese Sun” by Alex Kudera

I post a photograph in case we need a reminder that memoir & autofiction trend toward fiction.

"Chinese Sun"

My most recent publication, "Chinese Sun," begins on page 139 of Meniscus, Volume 12, Issue 2; the journal is the creation of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP). I'm quite proud of this piece, so I hope you give it a go.

we didn't have much

"Vincent Jeanbrun, the mayor of the Paris suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses, whose home was attacked while his wife and children were asleep inside on Saturday, on Monday described the situation as 'a real nightmare.'

"'I myself grew up in L'Hay-les-Roses in these large housing blocks,' Jeanbrun, a member of the centre-right Les Republicains party, told BFM TV. 'Our life was modest, we didn't have much, but we wanted to overcome it, we had hope that we would make it with hard work.'"

No one was in my life

"Adjunct survival led me to a bird that flew into my apartment only this past year while teaching abroad in Suzhou, China. Not dead yet and employed overseas again, I’d chased contract work to 'the Venice of the Far East'—a mainland city of man-made lakes and narrow canals—but I was alone. I had no friends. Gardens bloomed throughout the city, but there was no housing bulletin board at an American church. I had people in the program—teachers, students, staff—that I would exchange pleasantries with or occasional chitchat, but there was no one I was close to. I wasn’t going to stay up all night discussing politics, literature, or anything else. No one was in my life, and talking all about it no longer appealed to me."

~~ from "An Old Friend Called" by Alex Kudera

a primitive way

"My strength was nearly depleted when Avi stopped pressing hard against me; at last, I could see he was no threat to attack. I didn’t see anything we could win by furthering this contest, and I recognized that Avi’s theft was the initiation of the physical encounter, if not the first act of aggression. In hindsight, it’s hard to remember another time when anything I was involved with was settled in such a primitive way."

no conversion required

"Whereas Avi wanted me to know who I could become, the boy already knew who I was. An identification, no conversion required.

"He appointed me as his countryman, but he didn’t stop and give me time to pledge allegiance."

Letter from Cape Town, profile from France

For recent online reading, I appreciated the comical moments in Adam Gopnik's portrait of the far-right Algerian immigrant, media celebrity, and French presidential candidate in The New Yorker as well as this South African business about Nikolai Gogol and stolen noses in Harper's Magazine.

Letter from Les Banlieues

"The approach has left residents vulnerable to both the police and the virus. Paris had 732 virus deaths compared with 402 in Seine-Saint-Denis as of April 8, but the city has half again the population of the suburb, where many of the metropolis’s cashiers, deliverymen, transit workers, nurses and couriers live.

"'This is getting really tough,' said Larry Karache, an out-of-work shopkeeper, standing outside Chêne Pointu, the housing project where France’s 2005 urban riots were born, and which was depicted in last year’s hit film Les Miserables. 'We’re actually in prison here.'"

Mark SaFranko at 3 a.m.

No Future: An interview with Mark SaFranko https://t.co/nN2ZdQDMWz pic.twitter.com/U1OR15q1Tu

— 3:AM Magazine (@3ammagazine) January 8, 2016

from A Moveable Feast

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.”

― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 

(Both quotations are from Chapter 5, "A False Spring"; I'm rereading the book as included in The Restored Edition, which is, according to this edition, the one Hemingway had completed when he passed.)

books and paris

Here's a brief post for anyone who had one of those Monday mornings where you'd rather be reading in bed or you wished work would go away or you could leave work for Paris, France.

It looks like Shakespeare & Company has some competition in the city of lights. It's nice to read about any independent opening up a store (as opposed to closing one down).