Category: Uncategorized
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I like having a body
I have realised that, as embarrassing as it may be, I like having a body. I like that on any given afternoon, I can sink my fingers into a plate full of steaming rice and squeeze the brains of a prawn in a red curry directly on to it and then lick my fingers with…
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The Louvre and the ass of a horse
The first time someone visits the Louvre, they either go to see the famously cryptic smile of Monalisa or Venus de Milo or Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss and even Liberty Leading the People. There are, of course, also the magnificent remains of the palace of Susa and the Caryatids. Then there are the Italian…
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The Rings of Saturn
One could lie down on the grass at night for hours looking at stars. Though one quickly discovers that apart from stars, there are also planets, meteors, flying planes, the moon, and Elon Musk’s Starlink in the sky. Sirius is the brightest of the stars, from the Latin Sīrius, from the Ancient Greek Σείριος meaning glowing or scorcher. The…
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Banlieues Chéries
What is a banlieue? It took me some time to understand it. At first I didn’t understand it at all. I lived in Paris but if I walked 200 metres, I was no longer in Paris and found myself in Gentilly instead, where I’d once visited a Hawaiian restaurant that served Korean food. However, within…
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Rue du chat qui pêche
In the 5th arrondissement of Paris, next to the street of the cat that fishes, is an old 16th century building from the depths of which people can sometimes hear music. It seems almost like a surreal tableau or a real manifestation of an underground Biblical hell, with hundreds of people, half drunk, dancing late…
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The Hockney Exhibit
Whenever I have conversations these days, the sentences seem to be spoken as if by a defendant. It’s a performance, defence, in front of an invisible jury. People no longer talk, they defend. The invisible jury’s glowing faces, like knives (borrowed from Anne Carson), are ready to cut into the very flesh of the guilty.…
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The Fallen People
I often think of Paul Celan while walking alongside the Seine that, in the summer, smells like fish, sweat, and rotting apples. One can look at the green of the river and imagine the countless bodies that have fallen in it or will fall in it in the future, or one can also try to…
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Soyez bien, pas trop seule: on my chance meeting with Peter Handke
It was drizzling in Chaville, a sleepy southwestern suburb of Paris, when I got off the train from Montparnasse Bienvenue. I am not entirely sure why but this morning, after having read that Peter Handke lives there somewhere near the Meudon forest, I decided to take the train to Chaville and walk around — ballader…
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Clementines, Paris.
It’s -3 degrees outside. The skins of clementines from Corsica that I am eating in Paris smell like the sun of another solar system. When I bite into one of the orange sections, the juice runs in my mouth like warm blood. I no longer think about anything else, not my unhappiness, not even the…
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some things, some updates
I didn’t write a lot last year, since I am busy working on a longer project. My first manuscript ( a novella) is still without a publisher but not everything has been bad. My translation of Bhuwaneshwar’s short stories, Wolves and other stories, was shortlisted for the PFC-VoW award and my next translation of Rajkamal…
