by Preeta Samarasan
Today we asked our daughter to tell us a story. Here it is:
Amma and Daddy and Baby and Amma! We’re a family! We peed. And then we got up. And then we went downstairs and had some food. And then we had some dinner. And then we had some lunch. And then we went in the room to sleep. And then Daddy shaved off his scratchy chin. And then I took out my eyes. And then I took out Daddy’s eyes. And then we went to bed and then we got up.
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by Marshall Walker Lee
I say appearance, rather than reading, because the reading portion of the evening (voice and text and presence and performance) seemed if not beside the point then certainly a second-tier attraction. People came to gawk or moon, they came to get their galleys signed or to soak up the air conditioning. They came for the Q & A. Oh, the Q & A! Those words still have the power to summon a pang of sympathetic terror in me, a sour feeling in my guts. As soon as the author closed her book I watched, as in the sudden swipe of frames thrown by a magic lantern, the quiet backroom of the bookstore changed into a shooting gallery. The author blinked and squawked, a lone duck. And me? I hunched over my little table readying the register, stacking and restacking books, fidgeting in order to avoid eye contact.
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by Ann Marie Thornburg
I have often wished I knew more beloved poems by heart. This strikes me as something that could be soothing during distressing moments, or something to roll around in my head while standing in line at the grocery store, or even something to lull me to sleep instead of watching sheep float over that small wooden fence, one after another.
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by Nik De Dominic
Inevitably when someone comes into New Orleans to visit, I have to roll them by the Banksys. But usually when I drag people into a larger conversation about street art, Banksy seems to be the limit of their familiarity. Because of this, I wanted to put together a brief introduction to seven other contemporary street artists you should know.
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by Preeta Samarasan
On July 14th, the Prime Minister and First Lady of Malaysia had a private audience with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. The Prime Minister, Najib Razak, wore a dark suit; the First Lady, Rosmah Mansor, wore a pale blue baju kebaya, a traditional Malay women’s garment that harks back to a time before Malay culture was as heavily Islamised/Arabised as it is today. The Queen herself wore a daffodil yellow dress. In the room, there were at least two vases full of yellow flowers, perhaps more.
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