Statement of Record
A piece of tissue-thin onion-skin paper to which you pressed your vermilion-inked seal, and so sealed my fate. Belying the fragility of the parchment, it is an iron-clad document that “releases” me—as if I were a prisoner or a caged animal—from the mother who wanted me and the motherland that did not, to cross the great, roiling ocean to call another, “Mother.”
On Inception, Gaslighting and Trump/Russia: Or how Dirty Rubles Connects the Dots on a Story You May Think is Confusing, But Really Isn’t So Confusing After All.
...my life is not supposed to be like an apocalyptic science fiction movie. But it has been. The past, the present, and the future co-exist in Tehran.
(Sorry, hippy bros, but your calls for "peace" and "love" aren't helping all of the women who know how it feels to be held down by your "peace-loving" friends.)
Wang Ping’s Ten Thousand Waves is the telling of the migrant explorer’s story for survival. Packed with voices of the dead, Ping’s book reminds the reader how sacred each laborer’s life is in the face of unjust labor practices. Each person is more valuable than their labor, even when multinationals, banks, and political institutions act otherwise when...
Nevertheless, something like a baleful pollen in the air—a ghost pollen, impalpable rot, enveloping decay—suddenly became active with mysterious design, opening what was closed, closing what was open, upsetting calculations, contradicting specific gravity, making guarantees worthless.
Fifty-six years later, James Baldwin's words remain true: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won't destroy you."
Every person is his secret. If you take this away from him, his integrity is ruined. Human beings cannot live without secrets. These manifest early in the secretiveness of a child who guards his hidden “treasures,” who has his secret language and secret writing, who communicates in signs and drawings.
Some folks will dismiss Mr. Walser as a critic. They will say he sorely failed, that he confused his genres, mixed his fiction with his nonfiction, and got his tongue tied up by double-dipping into the real and the unreal. In a word, by being ekphrastic in his criticism...
The time to take a knee was last year, with and in support of Kaepernick. But most Black NFL players refused, even though their lives and the lives of their families are at stake. That players fear they will end up unemployed like Kaepernick is obvious. Only now, after Trump has called kneelers SOB’s and continues to demand their termination, have these athletes been...
I was a scrawny, 92 lb. bodyguard for Clive Barker in a DC bookstore, a week after he had been attacked by a zealous fan with a straight razor. A few years later, Irish writers started making their mark and taking their tolls...
She dreamt of vacuuming and she spoke the words out loud saying, “I am exhausted from cleaning the carpet.” And, “I think the house is crumbling; there is always dust on the floor.” But the people laughed and so she laughed because, let’s be honest, it was a ludicrous idea...
Statement of Record