also

susie bright's tomato sauce recipe

o my god, man. truly.
i made some this afternoon; it'd been on my 'to do' list for a piece.

it is tasty -
AND YET delicious.

that is all.

awe and gifts and taking

in Kargi (a farming village hit badly by drought near marsabit, which is in turn nowhere near nairobi, but is still most definitely in kenya) i'll be staying a week with O, a girlina a year younger than me. Some locals tried to kill her son while he was still in her stomach. She was taken out to the woods because she was five months pregnant out of wedlock. She was held down and people took turns stamping on her belly. Help came from some women who run an empowerment project in Kargi, pretty much the only ones who dared intervene.
O now has her own business selling sugar, tobacco &c; a local group funded by the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development gave her start-up money, and are also giving her counselling.
She has another child as well now, a daughter.
I was raised proper, so I already know I have to leave her in some way a bit richer than she was before I came. But what am I to end up giving O as a thankyou for letting me stay with her? What do I bring her? D'you know what I mean?

i would like to join a secret club

or to be able to speak without moving my lips.

that is how lazy i am. i am so lazy. and very very happy. when i stop being happy it'll be good to remember that at some point i was. you are please to remember this also, if you care to.

mcsweeney's arrived; it has a miranda july story in it. I may read it if i can find someone to turn the pages.

happy happy new year

hi erica, if you ever see this.

the other day, whilst checking over bank statements, i noticed that someone else (no idea who or how) spent about £1000 of my money while i was in south africa. they spent £800 at topman.com and the rest on coach fare and their vodafone phone bill. (I was on the o2 network). So that was in September- far too late to do or say anything about it now. I thought it was quite funny. I'm not even being sarcastic. I always secretly respect thieves.

a documentary by a sixteen year old...

...that filled me with dread. Because she's witnessing the destructive forces that are going to act on her and her friends as they try to become women.

I had an English teacher who used to go mad if anyone began a written sentence with the word 'because'.

o yeah...also... happy Black History Month.

my heart is breaking

this woman, why is she doing this thing?

harvard love

if this was the story of my engagement to be married and I read it over, I would be forced to lie down for a long time, then break the engagement off as soon as I rose.
It's not the details that chill me...I think they're sweet. It's the way the thing is told.

'They were drawn together by…'
'A relationship seemed hopeless until…'
'She wore…'
'The men wore...'

I can't....I mean I don't...I mean... what?

Unrelated, but notable (at least to me): the writer responsible for this piece lists South Africa as an interest.

i heart seeing dads interact with their daughters on public transport

'specially when the dad and the kid are having lots of fun, lots of fun, the girl is maybe eight months old and she's bouncing on her dad's lap and gurgling, and her dad's telling her the names of the streets they're passing, and she can't stop smiling her soft pink smile that's empty of teeth. Soon the girl gets slightly disoriented from all the bouncing and she goes quiet because she's not having fun anymore, but her dad doesn't notice (he thinks she's listening for his voice) and he lifts her to his shoulder and keeps joggling her. Then he starts humming the national anthem to her; by now the little girl is actually actually cross-eyed and looking over her dad's shoulder at me like 'help' -
so I smile and turn back to my book. it's a good book, called scheherazade goes west, by Fatema Mernissi, a professor of sociology at the University of Mohammed V in Rabat. I wish I'd studied under her- in its own genteel way her feminism is as feisty and inquisitive as bell hooks'. Plus I get the feeling she'd be kind to undergraduate essay scribblings. Mernissi's the one who excerpted the description of the scarily self-sufficient jinniyah (female jinn/djinn) that I posted below. Mernissi's asking why it is that, through ballet and American and European film and fiction, Scheherazade-the-formidable-intellect has been stripped of her politicism and presented merely as an entertainer to her murderous husband, a box that speaks pornography when her handle is turned. Poe murders Scheherazade because she talked too much and Gautier kills her off because she runs out of ideas. Mernissi's asking why women who think and speak and spar intellectually aren't seen as sexy in 'the west'. A good bit here when Mernissi sees a 'sexed up' edition of the thousand and one nights-
'I would never think of Scheherazade as nude and plump. Even though the climate is temperate in the Arab world, only delusional women in mental asylums discard their clothes. And as for plumpness, I associate it with a relaxed view of the world. I put on weight when I am happy and lose it when I get in trouble. For my generation, who grew up on the oral tradition of storytelling, before television, heroines only lose weight when they worry.
To be plump is a sign that a woman is in control of her fate.
So to my mind, Scheherazade must be thin. She has a violent husband, she is in fear of her life. I imagine her tense and strained.'

a description of the jinniyah who lived alone

'She outdid in beauty all human beings. She had a mouth as magical as Solomon's seal and hair blacker than the night...she had lips like corals and teeth like strung pearls...her middle was full of folds...she had thighs great and plump, like marble columns. Between her thighs was a goodly dome on pillars borne, like a bowl of silver or crystal.'
THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

'be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous'

...repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of
cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
(a.k.a The King, The King)

i wonder if girls have the same reasons for writing poetry as boys do

'I know a fat girl who only sleeps with poets. When I'm with her, I'm a poet, too. I won her with a poem.

O Beast of Walls!
O Walled in Fat Girl!
Your conquest was hardly worth
The while of one whom Arras and
Arrat, Felion, Ossa, Parnassus, Ida,
Pisgah and Pike's Peak never in-
terested.'

NATHANAEL WEST