Kendra_Smith_Laughs > Recent Status Updates

"Suttree groaned. A switchengine shunted cars in a distant yard, telescoping them in crescendo coupling by coupling to an iron thunder that rattled sashwork all down McAnally Flats. By this clangorous fanfare dull shapes with sidling eyes and pale green teeth congealed with menace out of the dark of the hemissphere."

"There is a vital thread of US responsibility that must be followed to understand what happened next. The consequences were not just the result of decisions of Sharon, Begin, and other Israeli leaders, or of the actions of Lebanese militias who were Israel's allies. They were also the direct responsibility of the Reagan administration (...)"

"The 1982 invasion of Lebanon was a watershed in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It was the first major war since May 15, 1948, to mainly involve the Palestinians rather than the armies of the Arab states."

"They rolled through the dim shires of McAnally singing rude songs and passing a bottle about in the musty old car. Wake up, Sut, and take ye a drink. What's wrong with old Suttree. Suttree's all right, said J-Bone."

"Out in the baking street with the bills wadded together in the toe of his pocket he swung along whistling. He went up Vine to Gay Street and along the walk by pawn-shop windows. Wares to find a thousand trades. Consulting with his image in the glass he studied a display of knives. Come in, come in. A round and shirtsleeved merchant from the doorway. Suttree moved along."

"The Palestinians involved repeatedly relayed the PLO's desire for recognition from Washington of its efforts on behalf of US interests, but Dean was authorized only to express his government's gratitude for the provision of security to American institutions"

"Suttree took the rope loose from the rail and began to haul the skiff along the side of the houseboat. It yawed and wallowed in the river. He threw the rope ashore and went down the plank and retrieved it from the mud and miring to his anklebones he eased the skiff in."

"Sundays a female evangelist from Knoxville would come out to hold service in the chapel downstairs. Concrete tabernacle, small wooden podium. The prisoners who went seemed stricken nigh insensate by this word of God strained distaff they were hearing"

"As in 1947, a new international legal formula harmful to the Palestinians came via the medium of a UN resolution, and as with the Balfour declaration of 1917, the key document contains not a single mention of Palestine or the Palestinians. Security Council Resolution 242 treated the entire issue as a state-to-state matter between the Arab countries and Israel (...)"

"As in 1947, a new international legal formula harmful to the Palestinians came via the medium of a UN resolution, and as with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the key document contains not a single mention of Palestine or the Palestinians. Security Council Resolution 242 treated the entire issue as a state-to-state matter between the Arab countries and Israel (...)"

"In the aftermath of the 1948 war, the Palestinians were virtually invisible, hardly covered in the Western media and rarely allowed to represent themselves internationally. They and their sacred cause were invoked by Arab governments, but they themselves played almost no independent role."

"Since 1917, the Palestinian national movement had been faced with the antagonistic tandem of Britain and its protégé, the Zionist project. But the yishuv had grown more and more hostile to its British patron after the passage of the 1939 White Paper."

"Sundays a female evangelist from Knoxville would come out to hold service in the chapel downstairs. Concrete tabernacle, small wooden podium. The prisoners who went seemed stricken nigh insensate by this word of God strained distaff they were hearing. Lounging in the wooden folding chairs, heads lolling."

"He went solitary and starlit through the sleepfast countryside, trotting soundlessly on his soft-worn shoes, past dead houses and dark land with the odour of ripe and humid fruits breathing in the fields and nightbirds crying in the keep of enormous birds."

"As the United Nations moved toward partition of Palestine, the king repeatedly met with them secretly in the hope of reaching an accord in which Jordan would incorporate the part of Palestine to be designated for its Arab majority."

"Through the midnight emptiness the few sounds carry with amphoric hollow and the city in its quietude seems to lie under edict. The buildings lean upon the dim and muted corridors where the watchman's heels click away the minutes"

"Emerging from economics and political science resource curse literature (...) offers an analysis of the typical oil state and its pathologies. It suggests that Equatorial Guinea will now become a member of a class of states that includes Nigeria, Venezuela and Kazakhstan, among others, in which the influx of oil money fuels a distinctive form of pathological development (...)"

"At each step of the way the main concerns were volume and fees. Who had an interest n maintaining quality? Perhaps it was not the government subsidy but these perverse incentives that led to the huge boom in bad lending and the crisis of 2007-2008."

"Night sounds and laughter drifted from the yellow shacks beyond the railspur and the river spooled past highbacked and hissing in the dark at his feet like the seething of sand in a glass, wind in a desert, the slow voice of ruin."

"These inter-Palestinian differences, exacerbated by the rivalries between the newly independent Arab states, are described by Dr. Husayn in painful detail. As he shows, much of the pre-war polarization between partisans and opponents of the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, dating to the revolt and before, continued into the postwar era."

"The uncle came through the door, looking about, hesitant. He stopped in the center of the room, arrested in the quadrate bar of dusty light davited between the window and its skewed replica on the far wall, a barren countenance cruelly lit, eyes watery and half closed with their slack pendules of flesh hanging down his cheeks. His hands moved slightly with the wooden smile he managed. Hey boy, he said."

"These inter-Palestinian differences, exacerbated by the rivalries between the newly independent Arab states are described by Dr. Husayn in painful detail. As he shows, much of the pre-war polarization between partisans and opponents of the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, dating to the revolt and before, continued into the post-war era."

<> (Balfour)

"Many peasants in villages neighbouring the new colonies had been deprived of their land as a result of the land sales. Some had also suffered in armed encounters with the first paramilitary units formed by the European Jewish settlers. Their trepidation was shared by Arab city dwellers in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem - the main centers of Jewish population then and now - (...)"

"When he reached the houseboat he shipped the oars and the skiff slewed to a stall and settled ponderously against the tire-casings nailed there. He swung himself up with the rope in one hand and made fast. The skiff bobbed and slid heavily and the bilgewater surged. The fish sculled sluggishly. Suttree stretched and rubbed his back and eyed the sun."

"He came back upriver rowing slowly, the fish struggling in a thin gray bilge in the floor of the boat, their soft barbels fingering with dull wonder the slimed boards and their backs where they bowed into the sunlight already bleached a bloodless pale. The brass oarlocks creaked in their blocks and the riverwater curled from the bowplanks with a viscid quality and lay behind the skiff in a wake like plowed mire"

"What the private issuers discovered was that if scrutinizing conventional mortgages was profitable, subprime was even more so. The financial engineering was more elaborate and one could charge more money for the services. The techniques of the fixed-income investment bankers were now brought fully into play."

"The mechanism of life is jammed, the way minutes and hours and days knit themselves, gather in the separate strands and knit them fast together into life, into being - it is jammed, blocked, broken."

"I want to live, I say. I don't want to tell my story. I want to live. Z says, the old story has to end before a new one can begin."