Because The Truth Is: This Is Not About Children. And When You Strip Away All The Layers And You Get

Because the truth is: this is not about children. And when you strip away all the layers and you get to the seed, this is not about children. If it were, these people would go to the sewers in Columbia, they’d go to AIDS wards. There’s millions of babies—they’re thrown out like trash on the streets, like cabbage. Nobody cares about the children once they’re on the planet; they don’t care. They walk around with guns and blow each other up. They have no food, they have nothing. Nobody cares about that. This is not about children. This is about having control over a woman’s sexuality. And some women don’t want to claim that power because they feel ashamed, they feel guilty, they’re torn—love and lust. Christianity has nothing—absolutely nothing to do with that. Nothing. And it saddens me because these people—the anti-choice people could be doing so much for the children that are on the planet.

Tori Amos (via pacify-eris)

Sonnets 1-3

Here you go, Deepayan and Kai – thanks for your kind words. These are from a longer narrative collection of sonnets called "The Storyville Fish and the Prince of Cats," a love story.

***

1

Deep in the lurid dark of New Orleans,

Its streets awash with tar and summer sweat,

An old composer rose from halfway dreams,

Awoken by the sound of a cornet.

He peered out into the lonely streets,

Discovering he no longer knew his town—

Once French provincial homes with drooping eaves

Now shotgun tenements of ill-renown.

Down on the corner beneath a lamppost

A coal-wagon boy relaxed on the curb

Where he played a long note, low and morose—

The saddest sound the old man ever heard.

“That’s just the way the music’s gone,” he said,

Fed his fish, fell asleep, died in his bed.

2

The movers arrived the following day

At the Karnofsky family’s front door.

They said, “The last great maestro passed away

Leaving you everything he had, no more.”

“The fish and its bowl aren’t worth a lot,

But the piano, it’s quite a treasure.”

Mrs. Karnofsky agreed with a nod

And invited the movers to enter.

They set the piano down in the hall

And then they handed the fishbowl over.

Left by herself to consider it all,

Mrs. Karnofsky searched for some closure.

“Grandfather didn’t have much in the end,

But for me, his piano and his friend.”

3

The Storyville Fish heard her think out loud,

And was amazed she had been called a friend.

Unsure whether to feel humbled or proud,

She found she simply could not comprehend.

“Old man lived alone

Heart bursting of things unsaid

Fish lived alone too.”

Thus pacified, the fish turned on her tail

And traveled round and around her glass room.

She never tired swimming the same trail

For it was the path of the sun and the moon.

This home was not much different than the last,

She thought, brushing a fin against the glass.

“…and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.”

Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Excerpt

...from a short story of 5,000 words called "The Severe Love of Sisters."

***

When wayfaring Viktor Pasternak drove into the sleepy town of Burr Ridge, traversing the shadowy foothills of the Rocky Mountains and the hell spawn-infested interstate to ask for Katherine Spencer’s hand, she instantly knew he was meant for her.

Or at least, that was one of many fantasies Anya and Katia had regarding the happy circumstances of their birth. Piecing together evidence from a handful of photographs and the lingering scent of lilacs pressed in the pockets of old dresses, the girls reinvented to their liking a history their widowed father preferred not to revisit.

In reality, all anyone knew for sure was that in Katherine Spencer’s many years of living and working in Burr Ridge, the shotgun-wielding auburn beauty had proven unquestionably capable of running a ranch alone. Yet when Viktor hitchhiked into town and persuaded her to hire him the winter of 1980, no one expected he would also convince her to marry him by spring. Small town gossip had it that Viktor poisoned Katherine within three years of their hasty wedding in order to inherit the ranch, but Anya and Katia knew they themselves were proof of their parents’ genuine love.

Gossip was one reason why invitations to barbeques and birthday parties always got lost en route to the Pasternaks’ mailbox. Viktor’s outlandish upper arm tattoos — which he said were a reminder of his Russian Orthodox faith — was another, and the remoteness of their ranch was a third. In any case, fantasy was an inexpendable occupation in the sisters’ early years. When they had only each other, theirs was always an equitable utopia, an impartial fairy tale in which Prince Charmings came in identical pairs and there was never a single fairest of them all. 

This was my first time shooting basketball this season and I'm obviously a bit rusty.

NU ladies fell to Penn State 77-63. At least they had pink jerseys for breast cancer awareness. And pink Willie and pink cheerleaders...

“Marie sometimes did more than merely write. In 1999, in East Timor, she was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children who were besieged in a compound by Indonesian-backed forces. She refused to leave them, waving goodbye to 22 journalist colleagues as she stayed on with an unarmed UN force in order to help highlight their plight by reporting to the world, in her paper and on global television. The publicity was rewarded when they were evacuated to safety after four tense days.

This was the essence of Marie’s approach to reporting. She was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents. ‘These are people who have no voice,’ she said. ‘I feel I have a moral responsibility towards them, that it would be cowardly to ignore them. If journalists have a chance to save their lives, they should do so.’

The people of East Timor did not forget their saviour. At the end of her Sunday Times report about her Sri Lankan experience, she wrote: ‘What I want most, as soon as I get out of hospital, is a vodka martini and a cigarette.’ Later that week, having moved briefly to a New York hotel, she was woken by a room-service waiter bearing a tray with a huge bottle of vodka and all the ingredients for her drink of choice. She discovered it had been ‘fixed, God knows how, by the East Timor crowd, the people in the compound’.” - The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade, on journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed by shelling in Syria Wednesday.

[Photo: Marie Colvin in the A&E documentary “Bearing Witness,” on women in war zones. Credit: A&E Indie Films via NY Times]