Where Babies Come From
Many are from the Maldives,
southwest of India, and must begin
collecting shells almost immediately.
The larger one may prefer coconuts.
Survivors move from island to island
hopping over one another and never
looking back. After the typhoons
have had their pick, and the birds of prey
have finished with theirs, the remaining few
must build boats, and in this, of course,
they can have no experience, they build
their boat of palm leaves and vines.
Once the work is completed, they lie down,
thoroughly exhausted and confused,
and a huge wave washes them out to sea.
And that is the last they see of one another.
In their dreams Mama and Papa
are standing on the shore
for what seems like an eternity,
and it is almost always the wrong shore.
-- James Tate
North Korean troops are apparently about to fight alongside Russian troops in Ukraine.
I don't see how this changes much. Do they get thrown into the meat grinder, or kept back as reserves? Do they speak any Russian re: integrating into the larger forces?
If anything, it strikes me as desperate, or a stunt at best. And Kim Jong-un will expect to be paid handsomely.
I think Fall is finally here. I even wore a jacket today.
Then again, this being Maryland, it could be 90 next week.
Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I've only read The Vegetarian, but I enjoyed it. Be advised that it's incredibly dark.
"The colors of the autumn in the garden were now brown and black. I had learned to see the brown of dead leaves and stalks as a color in its own right; I had collected grasses and reeds and taken pleasure in the slow change of their color from green to biscuit brown. I had even taken pleasure in the browned tints of flowers that had dried in vases without losing their petals; I had been unwilling to throw away such flowers. On autumn or winter mornings I had gone out to see brown leaves and stalks outlined with white frost. Now the hand of man had been withdrawn from the garden; everything had grown unchecked during the summer; and I felt only the cold and saw the tall grass and the wet and saw black and brown. On these short walks in the ruined manor garden, going a little farther each time, past the aspens, then past the great evergreen tree, then approaching the big white-framed greenhouse, after all this time as solid and whole-looking as it had ever been, on these walks brown became again for me what it had been in Trinidad: not a true color, the color of dead vegetation, not a thing one found beauty in, trash."
-- V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
