Fiona > Recent Status Updates

Strikes now were common. In the newspapers, university lecturers listed their complaints, the agreements that were trampled in the dust by government men whose own children were schooling abroad. Campuses were emptied, classrooms drained of life. Students hoped for short strikes, because they could not hope to have no strike at all. Everyone was talking about leaving.

Later, Ifemelu would think of the pregnancy as symbolic. It marked the beginning of the end and made everything else seem rapid, the months rushing past, time hurling forward. There was Aunty Uju, dimpled with exuberance, her face aglow, her mind busy with plans as her belly curved outwards. Every few days, she came up with a new girl’s name for the baby. “Oga is happy,” she said.

The Great Lover
–Rupert Brooke–

I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love’s praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire, illimitable, and still content,
And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife
Steals down, I

What is urgent is not urgent forever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, life itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death

If like myself you are a connoisseur of solitude, I recommend to you the experience of being alone in Paris on the fourteenth of July. On that day the city lets down it tumultuous hair, which the high summer anoints with warmth and perfume. In Paris every man has his girl; but on that day every man is a sultan. Then people flock together and sweep chattering about the city like flights of brilliantly coloured birds.

Arriving in Paris always causes me pain, even when I have been away for only a short while. It is a city which I never fail to approach with expectation and leave with disappointment. There is a question which only I can ask and which only Paris can answer; but this question is something which I have never yet been able to formulate. Certain things indeed I have learnt here: for instance, that my happiness has a sad

I find that sea voyages promote reflexion. Not that the night ferry can strictly be called a sea voyage in the ordinary sense. A necessary element in the experience of travelling by boat is the smell; whereas one of the special features of the night ferry is that one encounters the kin-aesthetic sensations of a boat combined with the olfactory sensations of a train.

We stood beside the iron lions on the Viaduct. The intense light of evening fell upon the spires and towers of St Bride to the south, St James to the north, St Andrew to the west, and St Sepulchre, and St Leonard Foster and St Mary-le-Bow to the east. The evening light quieted the houses and the abandoned white spires. Farringdon Street was still wide and empty.

World Atlas of Public Art features artworks installed, whether for a few hours or several decades, in the spaces where communities form. Public art requires that an artwork be accessible to broad publics. In addition to physical barriers, financial and institutional barriers can keep audiences away. This book doesnt include works developed for or in collections of private museums, sculpture gardens, or art islands

part of the multimedia and multisensory experience of the towns and cities where we live, work, and rest. From civic plazas to state parks, waterfront boardwalks to subway tunnels, and national theatres to community skate bowls: these places are sites of contradictions. They excite us and calm us. They are familiar to us and surprise us.
Public artworks play crucial roles in providing these experiences.

what you do, of course that is true and uninteresting. What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement toward truth. All theorising is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net

Hugo’s original name was not Belfounder. His parents were German, and his father adopted the name Belfounder when he came to live in England. He found it, I believe, on a tombstone in a Cotswold churchyard, and he thought that it would be good for business. It evidently was, for Hugo in due course inherited a flourishing armaments factory, and the firm of Belfounder and Baermann, Small-arms Ltd.

There are some parts of London which are necessary and others which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earls Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason. Dave lived west of Earls Court, and this was another thing I had against him. He lived off the Goldhawk Road, in one of those reddish black buildings

I’m a story-teller/journalist who believes there is always another side to the story. Not only that, the patron saint of journalism (in my view) is the Apostle Thomas – Doubting Thomas. Journalists must inspect the wound to be sure it is real. They cannot take on faith the fact that it exists. Jane Is basically interested in stories as incendiary devices. Having decided she believes someone, she sees it as her du

perhaps, I should say a word about myself. My name is James Donaghue, but you needn’t bother about that, as I was in Dublin only once, on a whisky blind, and saw daylight only twice, when they let me out of Store Street police station, and then when Finn put me on the boat for Holyhead. That was in the days when I used to drink. I am something over thirty and talented, but lazy. I live by literary hack-work,

She is not beautiful: that is an adjective which I use sparingly; but she is both pretty and attractive. Her prettiness lies in her regular features and fine complexion, which she covers over with a peach-like mask of make-up until all is as smooth and inexpressive as alabaster. Her hair is permanently waved in whatever fashion is declared to be the most becoming. It is a dyed gold.

It’s not a heartbeat is what I understand and the people who say it is are making a mistake because what they’re talking about as a beat is just electrics. It’s a stub where the heart will grow but they want to say ‘heart’ instead of ‘electrical impulses’ and they want to say ‘feelings’ instead of ‘inability to experience pain’ and they always say ‘baby’ instead of ‘foetus’

We see roadkill every day and when we do I imagine their life energy having left them, either with a violent pull or a gentle drifting of spirit strings that rise silver from the body and trail the sky. Those creatures are gone to a better place other than beside a lonesome stretch of road

Me? I have no name these days, I am called Sister. He found me on the picket line, it was a while back. I was a student of nursing when I heard about the clinic protests so I went and joined. It was a day of shouting and pushing. At the end of it he came to me and asked me to go with him and we’ve been together since that time, though once he said he wasn’t yet sure whether he would keep me.

The world has altered in the time he and I have been together. The infections and inquisitions, rumours of law changes and a strangled welfare system. Billionaires colonising the space stations. Our planet moving into extremity with heat events of fifty-degree days and fireflies arrived now in Tasmania. There are more households with generators than electricity running from wires. Houses made fit for other purposes,

Valentina’s our head clown. She thinks we’re all clowns but that while some of us know it most of us don’t. Her grandfather was a clockmaker in Moscow, he got arrested and taken away and they never saw him again. After that here father turned clown because horology was dangerous but he found clowning difficult too. Telling jokes was an extreme sport in those days.

Original cities were contained, concentrated social collectives. But Los Angeles is the opposite. Immune to everything but the limits of its host,the city expands at pace - to the edges of its territory: the mountains, its neighbors, the ocean’s verge - an infestation, a carcinoma.

He stayed in for New Year’s Eve, as usual, because of the noise.
Rolling pieces of wet paper into earplugs, he sat at the window,
nursing a bottle, watching the lights.
Always reminded him of the tracers – red, blue and yellow –
our guys firing back from the boats
at the planes coming over. The explosions.
He couldn’t even hear the splash of whiskey in the glass.

The fishermen with the long stares would say the haar is the sea’s breath, and the sea over shingle a dying man’s rattle. It was true for Lachlan from Pleasant Bay, with his face full of shrapnel and the death-shudders. I spaded his pack in after his remains; we were under fire, so a foot-deep had to do.

Late September.
Fire season: that hot, dry wind that gets people edgy,
listless, ready to fight but too tired to try, temperatures swinging
and this yellow light from the north
from the smoke of the wildfires burning
up in the tops of the canyons. You can see them at night
like necklaces, tightening.

The chintz and antimacassars, the china figurines crowding the window sills, all colors faded to pink, pale blue; photographs of the dead, slipped sideways in their mounts; the dining room ‘kept for best’, cold as the tomb and never entered; the smell of wet ash, the gloom of gas-lamps.

It’s getting hotter every day, but after work
up on the Hill, there’s a breeze,
and he buys a paper from the one-armed man
who’s always there in his suit, with one sleeve
pinned up, at his news-stand in the shade
of the pharmacy on 3rd and Grand.
Getting a coke from the cooler outside the Nugent
he goes to sit on the benches, their green paint flaking in the sun.
Old men were out, on corners, watching the world

And an hour of suburbs, before the public-address announcement
and the signs outside as it started to slow:

Welcome to Dreamland, Welcome to Wonderland,
Welcome to Hollywoodland. Welcome
to the City of Angels.

Cactus started giving way to palm, crossing the Colorado
at Yuma, and into California at last: cutting north-west
with mountains on one side and a lake on the other,
its surface-glint like chainmail. He stared harder
and saw it wasn’t water, but dead fish floating,
and the silver beaches weren’t sand, just heads and bones.

The papers say
‘Keep dogs and cats inside on the Fourth of July’
but nothing about ex-servicemen.
You can’t get tanked enough to block
the fireworks’ whine, their
door-burst slam, the rustling
shiver as they fail, fissling away.
So he watches the endless red, white and blue,
remembering he’s here in the States
not on Juno Beach or Bény-sur-Mer.
Star-rockets burst to their edges
with the sparse bright gold