Eventually, his monologue began to darken, and I could see his regally poised body begin to implode. He launched into a frenzied diatribe, describing how he had seen friends get their faces blown off while he was sitting in a Jeep talking to them, and how when he got back from his last deployment he started going to bars, drinking, snorting cocaine, and seducing women while his wife stayed home with their infant daughter. “I would call my wife from the bar, screaming and crying,” I remember him saying, “but I couldn’t stop — not even my baby girl would make me stop.” —“The Enemy Inside,” Daniel Baird, The Walrus
Searching for Bobby Fischer redux;
the race to pen the next Oslo Noir bestseller;
bringing a little bit of Ethiopia to Ithaca
Born in Kenya, raised in what today is Pakistan, a resident of the United Kingdom during World War II, Desani settled in India to create one of the most original novels of Empire’s decline. A mannered crazed contortion of various idioms of South-Asian-English, All About H. Hatterr follows the titular character—half-Malay, half-Anglo, all about exclamatories!—in his consultations of seven sages in seven cities, trying to determine what life, and this tale, too, is all about. —“The Heirs of Joyce’s Ulysses,” Joshua Cohen, The Daily Beast
Where does dough pounding rank among the world’s most dangerous professions?
in Indonesian politics: sex appeal and “Splitting open the Durian”;
in South Asian religious tensions: the Ahmadi oath
I hate BP, but I admire them too, in the same way I respect the work ethic of serial killers. I remember the day I learned that BP was using a submarine…with a web cam…a mile under the sea…to feed live video of their disaster to the world. My mind screamed “STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME LOVE YOU! MUST…THINK…OF DEAD BIRDS TO MAINTAIN ANGER!” The geeky side of me has a bit of a crush on them, but I still hate them for turning Florida into a dip stick. —“Betting on the bad guys,” Scott Adams, The Wall Street Journal
